The  Happy 

H  unting-Grounds 


;  *  s'  ^f aJt» -skeikhs^  who  had  ridden  in,  camel-back,  from  the  desert 
'  c*  ,'  ^*  i  '.^ ,"  •  i  .      j  j>\\^      Iq  pay  their  respects 


The 
Happy  Hunting-Grounds 


By 
Kermit   Roosevelt 

Author  of  "  War  in  the  Garden  of  Eden  " 


Illustrated  from  Photographs  by  the  Author 


London 

Hodder  &   Stoughton 

1920 


Veplae<zn\trvt 


■^'i' 


Copyright,  1912,  i<)20,  by  Charles  Scribner's  Sons,  foi  ( 
United  States  of  America 


Printed  by  the  Scribner  Press 
New  York.  U.  S.  A. 


TO 

THE  MISTRESS   OF   SAGAMORE 


494093 


Contents 

PAOS 

I.    The  Happy  Hunting-Grounds  ....  3 

II.    In  Quest  of  Sable  Antelope  ....  53 

III.    The  Sheep  of  the  Desert 71 

rV.    After  Moose  in  New  Brunswick      .     .  103 

V.    Two  Book-Hunters  in  South  America  .  123 

VI.    Seth    Bullock — Sheriff   of   the    Black 

Hills  Country 151 


Illustrations 

Arab  sheikhs  who  had  ridden  in,  camel-back,  from  the 

desert  to  pay  their  respects Frontispiece 

FACINQ 
PAGE 

Sir  Alfred  Pease's  sketch  of  om*  first  giraffe  hmit     .     .  24 

Father  and  R.  H.  Munro  Ferguson  at  the  Elkhom  Ranch, 

after  the  return  from  a  successful  hunting  trip  .     .  34 

Facsimile  of  a  pictiu-e  letter  by  father 38 

Putting  the  tape  on  a  tusker 42 

Launching  a  newly  made  dugout  on  the  D6vida      .     .  44 

A  relic  of  the  Portuguese  occupation;  an  old  well  beside 

the  trail 56 

The  Death  Dance  of  the  Wa  Nyika  children  in  memory 

of  the  chieftain's  little  son 58 

Across  the  bay  from  Mombasa;  the  porters  ready  to 

shoulder  loads  and  march 66 

A  desert  camp  in  old  Mexico 78 

Casares  on  his  white  mule 88 

Making  fast  the  sheep's  head 96 

A  noonday  halt  on  the  way  down  river,  returning  from 

the  hunting  country 106 

Bringing  out  the  trophies  of  the  hunt 118 

The  Captain  makes  advances  to  a  little  Indian  girl       .  152 

A  morning's  bag  of  prairie  chicken  in  South  Dakota     .  170 


I 

The  Happy 
Hunting-Grounds 


J  >  i»» 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-^GROUNDS 

There  is  a  universal  saying  to  the  effect 
that  it  is  when  men  are  ofiF  in  the  wilds  that 
they  show  themselves  as  they  really  are.  As 
is  the  case  with  the  majority  of  proverbs  there 
is  much  truth  in  it,  for  without  the  minor  com- 
forts of  life  to  smooth  things  down,  and  with 
even  the  elemental  necessities  more  or  less 
problematical,  the  inner  man  has  an  unusual 
opportunity  of  showing  himself — ^and  he  is  not 
always  attractive.  A  man  may  be  a  pleasant 
companion  when  you  always  meet  him  clad  in 
dry  clothes,  and  certain  of  substantial  meals  at 
regulated  intervals,  but  the  same  cheery  indi- 
vidual may  seem  a  very  diflferent  person  when 
you  are  both  on  half  rations,  eaten  cold,  and 
have  been  drenched  for  three  days — sleeping 
from  utter  exhaustion,  cramped  and  wet. 

My  father  had  done  much  hunting  with 
many  and  varied  friends.  I  have  often  heard 
him  say  of  some  one  whom  I  had  thought  an 
ideal  hunting  companion:    ''He's  a  good  fel- 

3 


4  '  TflE'  HAPPt  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

low,  but  he  was  always  fishing  about  in  the 
pot  for  the  best  piece  of  meat,  and  if  there  was 
but  one  partridge  shot,  he  would  try  to  roast 
it  for  himself.  If  there  was  any  delicacy  he 
wanted  more  than  his  share."  Things  assume 
such  different  proportions  in  the  wilds;  after 
two  months  living  on  palm-tree  tops  and 
monkeys,  a  ten-cent  can  of  condensed  milk 
bought  for  three  dollars  from  a  rubber  explorer 
far  exceeds  in  value  the  greatest  delicacy  of 
the  season  to  the  ordinary  citizen  who  has  a 
varied  and  suflScient  menu  at  his  command 
every  day  in  the  year. 

Even  as  small  children  father  held  us  re- 
sponsible to  the  law  of  the  jungle.  He  would 
take  us  out  on  camping  trips  to  a  neck  of  land 
four  or  five  miles  across  the  bay  from  home. 
We  would  row  there  in  the  afternoon,  the  boats 
laden  with  blankets  and  food.  Then  we 
would  make  a  driftwood  fire  on  which  to  fry 
our  supper — usually  bacon  and  chicken.  I 
do  not  know  whether  it  was  the,  to  us,  wild 
romance  of  our  position,  or  the  keen  appetite 
from  the  row,  but  never  since  then  have  I 
eaten  such  bacon.  Not  even  the  smallest 
child  was  allowed  to  show  a  disposition  to 
grab,  or  select  his  pieces  of  chicken — ^we  were 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    5 

taught  that  that  was  an  unpardonable  offense 
out  camping,  and  might  cause  the  culprit  to 
be  left  behind  next  time.  And  woe  to  any  one 
who  in  clumsily  walking  about  kicked  sand 
into  the  frying-pan.  After  supper  we  would 
heap  more  driftwood  on  the  fire,  and  drape 
ourselves  in  our  blankets.  Then  we  would 
stretch  ourselves  out  in  the  sand  while  father 
would  tell  us  ghost  stories.  The  smallest  of 
us  lay  within  reach  of  father  where  we  could 
touch  him  if  the  story  became  too  vivid  for 
our  nerves  and  we  needed  the  reassuring  feel 
of  his  clothes  to  bring  us  back  to  reality. 
There  was,  however,  a  delicious  danger  in  be- 
ing too  near  him.  In  stories  in  which  the 
"haunt"  seized  his  victim,  father  generally 
illustrated  the  action  by  making  a  grab  at 
the  nearest  child.  After  the  stories  were  fin- 
ished we  rolled  up  in  our  blankets  and,  thor- 
oughly permeated  with  sand,  we  slept  until  the 
first  faint  light  of  dawn.  Then  there  was  the 
fire  to  be  built  up,  and  the  breakfast  cooked, 
and  the  long  row  home.  As  we  rowed  we 
chanted  a  ballad,  usually  of  a  seafaring  na- 
ture; it  might  be  "The  Rhyme  of  the  Three 
Sealers,"  or  "The  GaUey  Slave,"  or  "Simon 
Danz."    Father  taught  us  these  and  many 


6    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

more,  viva  voce,  when  he  was  dressing  for 
dinner.  A  child  was  not  taken  along  on  these 
"campings  out"  until  he  was  six  or  seven. 
They  took  place  three  or  four  times  a  summer, 
and  continued  until  after  the  African  ex- 
pedition. By  that  time  we  were  most  of  us 
away  at  work,  scattered  far  and  wide. 

Father  always  threw  himself  into  our  plays 
and  romps  when  we  were  small  as  if  he  were 
no  older  than  ourselves,  and  with  all  that  he 
had  seen  and  done  and  gone  through,  there  was 
never  any  one  with  so  fresh  and  enthusiastic 
an  attitude.  His  wonderful  versatility  and 
his  enormous  power  of  concentration  and  ab- 
sorption were  unequalled.  He  could  turn  from 
the  consideration  of  the  most  grave  problems 
of  state  to  romp  with  us  children  as  if  there 
were  not  a  worry  in  the  world.  Equally  could 
he  bury  himseK  in  an  exhaustive  treatise  on 
the  History  of  the  Mongols  or  in  the  Hound 
of  the  Baslcervilles, 

Until  father  sold  his  ranches  in  North  Dakota 
he  used  to  go  out  West  each  year  for  a  month 
or  so.  Unfortunately,  we  were  none  of  us 
old  enough  to  be  taken  along,  but  we  would 
wait  eagerly  for  his  letters,  and  the  recipient  of 
what  we  called  a  picture  letter  gloried  in  the 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    7 

envy  of  the  rest  until  another  mail  placed  a 
substitute  upon  the  pedestal.  In  these  picture 
letters  father  would  sketch  scenes  and  incidents 
about  the  ranch  or  on  his  short  hunting  trips. 
We  read  most  of  them  to  pieces,  unluckily, 
but  the  other  day  I  came  across  one  of  the 
non-picture  letters  that  father  wrote  me: 

August  80,  '96. 
Out  on  the  prairie. 
I  must  send  my  little  son  a  letter  too,  for  his  father 
loves  him  very  much.  I  have  just  ridden  into  camp 
on  Muley,*  with  a  prongbuck  strapped  behind  the 
saddle;  I  was  out  six  hours  before  shooting  it.  Then 
we  all  sat  down  on  the  ground  in  the  shade  of  the  wagon 
and  had  dinner,  and  now  I  shall  clean  my  gim,  and  then 
go  and  take  a  bath  in  a  big  pool  nearby,  where  there 
is  a  large  flat  stone  on  the  edge,  so  I  don't  have  to  get 
my  feet  muddy.  I  sleep  in  the  buffalo  hide  bag  and 
I  never  take  my  clothes  off  when  I  go  to  bed ! 

By  the  time  we  were  twelve  or  thirteen  we 
were  encouraged  to  plan  hunting  trips  in  the 
Westo  Father  never  had  time  to  go  with  us, 
but  we  would  be  sent  out  to  some  friend  of  his, 
like  Captain  Seth  Bullock,  to  spend  two  or 
three  weeks  in  the  Black  Hills,  or  perhaps  we 

*  Fifteen  years  later  when  I  was  in  Medora  with  Captain  Seth  Bul- 
lock, Muley  was  still  alive  and  enjoying  a  life  of  ease  in  Joe  Ferris's 
pastures. 


8    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

would  go  after  duck  and  prairie-chicken  with 
Marvin  Hewitt.  Father  would  enter  into  all 
the  plans  and  go  down  with  us  to  the  range 
to  practise  with  rifle  or  shotgun,  and  when  we 
came  back  we  would  go  over  every  detail  of  the 
trip  with  him,  revelling  in  his  praise  when  he 
felt  that  we  had  acquitted  ourselves  well. 

Father  was  ever  careful  to  correct  statements 
to  the  effect  that  he  was  a  crack  shot.  He 
would  explain  how  little  being  one  had  to  do 
with  success  and  achievement  as  a  hunter. 
Perseverance,  skill  in  tracking,  quick  vision, 
endurance,  stamina,  and  a  cool  head,  coupled 
with  average  ability  as  a  marksman,  produced 
far  greater  results  than  mere  skill  with  a  rifle 
— unaccompanied  to  any  marked  extent  by 
the  other  attributes.  It  was  the  sum  of  all 
these  qualities,  each  above  the  average,  but 
none  emphasized  to  an  extraordinary  degree, 
that  accounted  for  father's  great  success  in 
the  hunting-field.  He  would  point  out  many 
an  excellent  shot  at  a  target  who  was  of  no  use 
against  game.  Sometimes  this  would  be  due 
to  lack  of  nerve.  Father  himself  was  equally 
cool  and  unconcerned  whether  his  quarry  was  a 
charging  lion  or  a  jack-rabbit;  with,  when  it 
came  to  the  question  of  scoring  a  hit,  the  re- 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    9 

sultant  advantage  in  the  size  of  the  former  as 
a  target.  In  other  instances  a  good  man  at 
the  range  was  not  so  good  in  the  field  because 
he  was  accustomed  to  shooting  under  conven- 
tional and  regulated  conditions,  and  fell  down 
when  it  came  to  shooting  under  disadvanta- 
geous circumstances — if  he  had  been  running 
and  were  winded,  if  he  were  hungry  or  wet, 
or  tired,  or  feeling  the  sun,  if  he  were  uncertain 
of  the  wind  or  the  range.  Sometimes,  of 
course,  a  crack  shot  possesses  all  the  other 
qualities;  such  is  the  case  with  Stewart  Edward 
White,  whom  Cuninghame  classified  as  the 
best  shot  with  whom  he  had  hunted  in  all  his 
twenty-five  years  in  the  wilds.  Father  shot 
on  a  par  with  Cuninghame,  and  a  good  deal 
better  than  I,  though  not  as  well  as  Tarleton. 

I  have  often  heard  father  regret  the  fact 
that  he  did  not  care  for  shooting  with  the  shot- 
gun. He  pointed  out  that  it  was  naturally 
the  most  accessible  and  least  expensive  form 
of  hunting.  His  eyesight  made  it  almost 
impossible  for  him  to  attain  much  skill  with  a 
shotgun,  and  although  as  a  boy  and  young 
man  he  went  oflF  after  duck  for  sport,  in  later 
years  he  never  used  a  shotgun  except  for 
collecting  specimens  or  shooting  for  the  pot. 


10    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

He  continually  encouraged  us  to  learn  to  shoot 
with  the  gun.  In  a  letter  he  wrote  me  to  Eu- 
rope when  I  was  off  after  chamois  he  said:  "I 
have  played  tennis  a  little  with  both  Archie 
and  Quentin,  and  have  shot  with  the  rifle  with 
Archie  and  seen  that  he  has  practised  shot- 
gun shooting  with  Seaman." 

When  my  brother  and  myself  were  ten  and 
eight,  respectively,  father  took  us  and  four  of 
our  cousins  of  approximately  the  same  ages  to 
the  Great  South  Bay  for  a  cruise,  with  some 
fishing  and  bird-shooting  thrown  in,  as  the 
guest  of  Regis  Post.  It  was  a  genuine  sacri- 
fice on  father's  part,  for  he  loathed  sailing, 
detested  fishing,  and  was,  to  say  the  least,  luke- 
warm about  bird-shooting.  Rowing  was  the 
only  method  of  progression  by  water  for  which 
he  cared.  The  trip  was  a  great  success,  how- 
ever, and  father  enjoyed  it  more  than  he  an- 
ticipated, for  with  the  help  of  our  host  he  in- 
structed us  in  caring  for  ourselves  and  our 
firearms.  I  had  a  venerable  12-bore  pin-fire 
gun  which  was  the  first  weapon  my  father  ever 
owned.  It  was  usually  known  in  the  family  as 
the  "rust  bore"  because  in  the  course  of  its 
eventful  career  it  had  become  so  pitted  and 
scarred  with  rust  that  you  could  put  in  as  much 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    11 

time  as  you  wished  cleaning  and  oiling  without 
the  slightest  effect.  I  stood  in  no  little  awe  of 
the  pin-fire  because  of  its  recoil  when  fired,  and 
as  I  was  in  addition  a  miserably  poor  shot,  my 
bag  on  the  Great  South  Bay  trip  was  not 
large.  It  consisted  of  one  reedbird,  which 
father  with  infinite  pains  and  determination 
at  length  succeeded  in  enabling  me  to  shoot. 
I  am  sure  he  never  spent  more  time  and  effort 
on  the  most  difficult  stalk  after  some  coveted 
trophy  in  the  West  or  in  Africa. 

Father's  hunting  experiences  had  been  con- 
fined to  the  United  States,  but  he  had  taken 
especial  interest  in  reading  about  Africa,  the 
sportsman's  paradise.  When  we  were  small  he 
would  read  us  incidents  from  the  hunting  books 
of  Roualeyn  Gordon  Gumming,  or  Samuel 
Baker,  or  Drummond,  or  Baldwin.  These  we 
always  referred  to  as  "I  stories,"  because  they 
were  told  in  the  first  person,  and  when  we  were 
sent  to  bed  we  would  clamor  for  just  one  more, 
a  petition  that  was  seldom  denied.  Before 
we  were  old  enough  to  appreciate  the  adven- 
tures we  were  shown  the  pictures,  and  through 
Cornwallis  Harris's  beautiful  colored  prints 
in  the  Portraits  of  Game  and  Wild  Animals  of 
Southern  Africa  we  soon  learned  to  distinguish 


12    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

the  great  beasts  of  Africa.  The  younger 
Gordon  Gumming  came  to  stay  with  us  at 
Sagamore,  and  when  father  would  get  him  to 
tell  us  hunting  incidents  from  his  own  varied 
career,  we  listened  enthralled  to  a  really  living 
"I  story."  To  us  he  was  knowa  as  the  "Ele- 
phant Man,"  from  his  prowess  in  the  pursuit  of 
the  giant  pachyderm. 

Then  there  was  also  the  "Shark  Man." 
He  was  an  Australian  who  told  us  most  thrill- 
ing tales  of  encounters  with  sharks  witnessed 
when  among  the  pearl-divers.  I  remember 
vividly  his  description  of  seeing  a  shark  at- 
tack one  of  the  natives  working  for  him.  The 
man  was  pulled  aboard  only  after  the  shark 
had  bitten  a  great  chunk  from  his  side  and  ex- 
posed his  heart,  which  they  could  see  still 
beating.  He  said,  "Master,  master,  big  fish," 
before  he  died. 

The  illustrations  in  Millais's  Breath  from  the 
Veldt  filled  us  with  delight,  and  to  this  day  I 
know  of  no  etching  that  affects  me  as  does  the 
frontispiece  by  the  author's  father.  It  is 
called  the  "Last  Trek."  An  old  hunter  is  ly- 
ing dead  beside  his  ox-wagon;  near  him  squat 
two  of  his  Kafir  boys,  and  in  the  distance  graze 
herds  of  zebra  and  hartebeeste  and  giraflfe. 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    13 

Of  the  mighty  hunters  that  still  survived 
at  that  time,  father  admired  most  Mr.  F.  C. 
Selous.  His  books  he  knew  almost  by  heart. 
Whenever  Selous  came  to  the  United  States 
he  would  stay  with  us,  and  father  would  sit 
up  till  far  into  the  night  talking  of  wild  life 
in  the  open.  Selous,  at  sixty-five,  enlisted  in 
the  late  war  as  a  private;  he  rose  to  be  captain, 
and  was  decorated  with  the  D.  S.  O.  for  gal- 
lantry, before  he  fell,  fighting  the  Germans 
in  East  Africa.  No  one  could  have  devised  a 
more  fitting  end  for  the  gallant  old  fellow  than 
to  die  at  the  head  of  his  men,  in  a  victorious 
battle  on  those  plains  he  had  roamed  so  often 
and  loved  so  well,  fighting  against  the  worst 
and  most  dangerous  beast  of  his  generation. 

In  1887  father  founded  a  hunting  club 
called  the  "Boone  and  Crockett"  after  two 
of  the  most  mighty  hunters  of  America.  No 
one  was  entitled  to  membership  who  had  not 
brought  down  in  fair  chase  three  species  of 
American  big  game.  The  membership  was 
limited  to  a  hundred  and  I  well  remember  my 
father's  pride  when  my  brother  and  I  qualified 
and  were  eventually  elected  members.  The 
club  interests  itself  particularly  in  the  con- 
servation of  wild  life,  and  the  establishment 


14    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

of  game  refuges.  Mr.  Selous  and  other  Eng- 
lish hunters  were  among  the  associate  mem- 
bers. 

In  the  summer  of  1908  my  father  told  me 
that  when  his  term  in  the  White  House  ended 
the  following  spring,  he  planned  to  make  a 
trip  to  Africa,  and  that  if  I  wished  to  do  so  I 
could  accompany  him.  There  was  no  need 
to  ask  whether  I  wanted  to  go.  At  school 
when  we  were  writing  compositions,  mine  al- 
most invariably  took  the  form  of  some  im- 
aginary journey  across  the  "Dark  Continent." 
Still,  father  had  ever  made  it  a  practice  to  talk 
to  us  as  if  we  were  contemporaries.  He  would 
never  order  or  even  tell  us  to  follow  a  certain 
line;  instead,  he  discussed  it  with  us,  and  let 
us  draw  our  own  conclusions.  In  that  way  we 
felt  that  while  we  had  his  unreserved  backing, 
we  were  yet  acting  on  our  own  initiative,  and 
were  ourselves  responsible  for  the  results.  If 
a  boy  is  forced  to  do  a  thing  he  often  makes 
but  a  half-hearted  attempt  to  succeed,  and  lays 
his  failure  to  the  charge  of  the  person  who 
forced  him,  although  he  might  well  have  come 
through  with  flying  colors  had  he  felt  that  he 
was  acting  on  his  own  responsibility.  In  his 
discussions   with   us,  father   could   of  course 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    15 

shape  our  opinions  in  what  he  thought  the 
proper  raould. 

In  Hke  manner,  when  it  came  to  taking  me 
to  Africa  father  wanted  me  to  go,  but  he  also 
wanted  me  to  thoroughly  understand  the  pro's 
and  con's.  He  explained  to  me  that  it  was  a 
holiday  that  he  was  allowing  himself  at  fifty, 
after  a  very  busy  life — that  if  I  went  I  would 
have  to  make  up  my  mind  that  my  holiday 
was  coming  at  the  beginning  of  my  life,  and 
be  prepared  to  work  doubly  hard  to  justify 
both  him  and  myself  for  having  taken  it.  He 
said  that  the  great  danger  lay  in  my  being  un- 
settled, but  he  felt  that  taken  rightly  the  ex- 
perience could  be  made  a  valuable  asset  instead 
of  a  liability.  After  we  had  once  finished  the 
discussion  and  settled  that  I  was  to  go,  father 
never  referred  to  it  again.  He  then  set  about 
preparing  for  the  expedition.  Mr.  Edward 
North  Buxton  was  another  African  hunter 
whom  he  greatly  admired,  and  it  was  to  him 
and  to  Selous  that  he  chiefly  turned  for  aid 
in  making  his  plans.  It  was  often  said  of 
father  that  he  was  hasty  and  inclined  to  go 
off  at  half-cock.  There  was  never  any  one  who 
was  less  so.  He  would  gather  his  informa- 
tion and  make  his  preparations  with  pains- 


16    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

taking  care,  and  then  when  the  moment  came 
to  act  he  was  thoroughly  equipped  and  pre- 
pared to  do  so  with  that  lightning  speed  that 
his  enemies  characterized  as  rash  hot-headed- 
ness. 

Father  always  claimed  that  it  was  by  dis- 
counting and  guarding  against  all  possible 
causes  of  failure  that  he  won  his  successes. 
His  last  great  battle,  that  for  preparedness  for 
the  part  that  "America  the  Unready"  would 
have  to  play  in  the  World  War,  was  true  to 
his  life  creed.  For  everything  he  laid  his 
plans  in  advance,  foreseeing  as  far  as  was 
humanly  possible  each  contingency  to  be  en- 
countered. 

For  the  African  expedition  he  made  ready 
in  every  way.  I  was  at  the  time  at  Harvard, 
and  almost  every  letter  brought  some  reference 
to  preparations.  One  day  it  would  be:  "The 
Winchester  rifles  came  out  for  trial  and  all 
of  them  were  sighted  wrong.  I  sent  them 
back  with  rather  an  acid  letter."  Then  again: 
"You  and  I  will  be  so  rusty  when  we  reach 
Sir  Alfred  Pease's  ranch  that  our  first  eflForts 
at  shooting  are  certain  to  be  very  bad.  In 
March  we  will  practise  at  Oyster  Bay  with  the 
30-30  until  we  get  what  I  would  call  the 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    17 

*  rifle  sense'  back  again,  and  this  will  make  it 
easier  for  us  when,  after  a  month's  sea  trip,  we 
take  up  the  business  of  hunting." 

A  group  of  thirty  or  forty  of  the  most  famous 
zoologists  and  sportsmen  presented  my  father 
with  a  heavy,  double-barrelled  gun.  "At  last 
I  have  tried  the  double-barrelled  Holland 
Elephant  rifle.  It  is  a  perfect  beauty  and  it 
shoots  very  accurately,  but  of  course  the  re- 
coil is  tremendous,  and  I  fired  very  few  shots. 
I  shall  get  you  to  fire  it  two  or  three  times  at  a 
target  after  we  reach  Africa,  just  so  that  you 
shall  be  thoroughly  familiar  with  it,  if,  or  when, 
you  use  it  after  big  game.  There  is  no  ques- 
tion that  except  under  extraordinary  circum- 
stances it  would  be  the  best  weapon  for  ele- 
phant, rhino,  and  buffalo.  I  think  the  405 
Winchester  will  be  as  good  for  everything 
else." 

"About  all  my  African  things  are  ready  now, 
or  will  be  in  a  few  days.  I  suppose  yours  are 
in  good  trim  also  [a  surreptitious  dig  at  a 
somewhat  lackadaisical  son.]  I  am  pursuing 
my  usual  plan  of  taking  all  the  precautions  in 
advance." 

A  few  days  later  came  another  reference  to 
the   Holland    &  Holland:    "The  double-bar- 


18    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

relied  four-fifty  shot  beautifully,  but  I  was 
paralyzed  at  the  directions  which  accompanied 
it  to  the  eflfect  that  two  shots  must  always  be 
fired  in  the  morning  before  starting,  as  other- 
wise from  the  freshly  oiled  barrels  the  first 
shot  would  go  high.  This  is  all  nonsense  and 
I  shall  simply  have  to  see  that  the  barrels  are 
clean  of  the  oil."  The  recoil  of  the  big  gun 
was  so  severe  that  it  became  a  standing  joke 
as  to  whether  we  did  not  fear  it  more  than  a 
charging  elephant ! 

Father  gave  the  closest  attention  to  every 
detail  of  the  equipment.  The  first  provision 
Hsts  prepared  by  his  friends  in  England  were 
drawn  up  on  a  presidential  scale  with  cham- 
pagne and  pate  de  foies  gras  and  all  sorts  of 
luxuries.  These  were  blue-pencilled  and  two 
American  staples  substituted — baked  beans 
and  canned  tomatoes.  Father  always  retained 
the  appreciation  of  canned  tomatoes  gained  in 
the  early  ranching  days  in  the  West.  He  would 
explain  how  delicious  he  had  found  it  in  the 
Bad  Lands  after  eating  the  tomatoes  to  drink 
the  juice  from  the  can.  In  hunting  in  a  tem- 
perate climate  such  as  our  West,  a  man  can 
get  along  with  but  very  little,  and  it  is  diflScult 
to  realize  that  a  certain  amount  of  luxury  is 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    19 

necessary  in  the  tropics  to  maintain  oneself 
fit.  Then,  too,  in  Africa  the  question  of  trans- 
portation was  fairly  simple — and  almost  every- 
where we  were  able  to  keep  ourselves  and  the 
porters  amply  supplied  with  fresh  meat.  Four 
years  later  during  the  descent  of  the  Duvida — 
the  ""River  of  Doubt" — we  learned  to  our  bitter 
cost  what  it  meant  to  travel  in  the  tropics  as 
lightly  equipped  as  one  could,  with  but  Httle 
hardship,  in  the  north.  It  was  not,  however, 
through  our  own  lack  of  forethought,  but  due 
rather  to  the  necessities  and  shifting  chances 
of  a  diflScult  and  dangerous  exploring  expedi- 
tion. 

Even  if  it  is  true  as  Napoleon  said,  that  an 
army  marches  on  its  belly,  still,  it  won't  go  far 
unless  its  feet  are  properly  shod,  and  since  my 
father  had  a  skin  as  tender  as  a  baby's,  he 
took  every  precaution  that  his  boots  should 
fit  him  properly  and  not  rub.  "The  modified 
duffle-bags  came  all  right.  I  suppose  we  will 
get  the  cotton-soled  shoes,  but  I  do  not  know. 
How  do  you  like  the  rubber-soled  shoes  .^ 
Don't  you  think  before  ordering  other  pairs 
it  would  be  as  well  to  wait  until  you  see  the 
army  shoes  here,  which  are  light  and  somehow 
look  as  if  they  were  more  the  kind  you  ordi- 


20    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

narily  use?  How  many  pairs  have  you  now 
for  the  African  trip,  and  how  many  more  do 
you  think  you  want?" 

Father  was  fifty  years  old  in  the  October  be- 
fore we  left  for  Africa,  and  the  varied  experi- 
ences of  his  vigorous  life  had,  as  he  used  to 
say,  battered  and  chipped  him.  One  eye  was 
to  all  intents  useless  from  the  effects  of  a 
boxing-match,  and  from  birth  he  had  been  so 
astigmatic  as  to  be  absolutely  unable  to  use  a 
rifle  and  almost  unable  to  find  his  way  in  the 
woods  without  his  glasses.  He  never  went  off 
without  eight  or  ten  pairs  so  distributed 
throughout  his  kit  as  to  minimize  the  possi- 
bility of  being  crippled  through  any  ordinary 
accident.  Even  so,  any  one  who  has  worn 
glasses  in  the  tropics  knows  how  easily  they 
fog  over,  and  how  hopeless  they  are  in  the 
rains.  It  was  a  continual  source  of  amazement 
to  see  how  skilfully  father  had  discounted  this 
handicap  in  advance  and  appeared  to  be  un- 
hampered by  it. 

Another  serious  threat  lay  in  the  leg  that 
had  been  injured  when  the  carriage  in  which 
he  was  driving  was  run  down  by  a  trolley-car, 
and  the  secret  service  man  with  him  was 
killed.     In  September,  1908,  he  wrote  me  from 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    21 

Washington:  *'I  have  never  gotten  over  the 
eflfects  of  the  trolley-car  accident  six  years  ago, 
when,  as  you  will  remember,  they  had  to  cut 
down  to  the  shin  bone.  The  shock  per- 
manently damaged  the  bone,  and  if  anything 
happens  there  is  always  a  chance  of  trouble 
which  would  be  serious.  Before  I  left  Oyster 
Bay,  while  riding,  I  got  a  rap  on  the  shin 
bone  from  a  branch.  This  was  either  the  cause 
or  the  occasion  of  an  inflammation,  which  had 
grown  so  serious  when  I  got  back  here  that 
Doctor  Rixey  had  to  hastily  take  it  in  hand. 
For  a  couple  of  days  it  was  uncertain  whether 
we  would  not  have  to  have  another  operation 
and  remove  some  of  the  bones  of  the  leg,  but 
fortunately  the  doctor  got  it  in  hand  all  right, 
and  moreover  it  has  enabled  me  to  learn  just 
what  I  ought  to  do  if  I  am  threatened  with 
similar  trouble  in  Africa." 

His  activity,  however,  was  little  hampered 
by  his  leg,  for  a  few  weeks  later  he  wrote: 
"I  have  done  very  little  jumping  myself,  and 
that  only  of  the  small  jumps  up  to  four  feet, 
because  it  is  evident  that  I  have  got  to  be 
pretty  careful  of  my  leg,  and  that  an  accident 
of  at  all  a  serious  character  might  throw  me 
out  of  gear  for  the  African  trip.    This  after- 


22    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

noon  by  the  way,  Archie  Butt  and  I  took  a 
scramble  down  Rock  Creek.  It  was  raining 
and  the  rocks  were  sKppery,  and  at  one  point 
I  slipped  off  into  the  creek,  but  merely  bruised 
myself  in  entirely  safe  places,  not  hurting  my 
leg  at  all.  When  we  came  to  the  final  and 
stiffest  cliff  climb,  it  was  so  dark  that  Archie 
couldn't  get  up."  From  which  it  may  be 
seen  that  neither  endurance  nor  skill  suffered 
as  a  result  of  the  accident  to  the  leg.  Still,  as 
Bret  Harte  says,  "We  always  wink  with  the 
weaker  eye,"  and  when  anything  went  wrong, 
the  leg  was  sure  to  be  implicated.  Father 
suffered  fearfully  with  it  during  the  descent 
of  the  River  of  Doubt.  One  of  the  most  con- 
stant pictures  of  father  that  I  retain  is  at  Saga- 
more after  dinner  on  the  piazza.  He  would 
draw  his  chair  out  from  the  roofed-over  part 
to  where  he  could  see  the  moon  and  the 
stars.  When  things  were  black  he  would  often 
quote  Jasper  Petulengro  in  Borrow's  Lavengro: 
"Life  is  sweet,  brother.  .  .  .  There's  day  and 
night,  brother,  both  sweet  things;  sun,  moon, 
and  stars,  all  sweet  things;  .  .  .  and  likewise 
there's  a  wind  on  the  heath,"  and  would  add: 
"Yes,  there's  always  the  wind  on  the  heath." 
From  where  he  sat  he  looked  across  the  fields 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    «3 

to  the  dark  woods,  and  over  the  tree-tops  to 
the  bay  with  the  changing  twinkling  lights  of 
the  small  craft;  across  the  bay  to  the  string 
of  lamps  along  the  causeway  leading  to  Centre 
Island,  and  beyond  that  again  Long  Island 
Sound  with  occasionally  a  "tall  Fall  Steamer 
light."  For  a  while  father  would  drink  his 
coffee  in  silence,  and  then  his  rocking-chair 
would  start  creaking  and  he  would  say:  "Do 
you  remember  that  night  in  the  Sotik  when 
the  gunbearers  were  skinning  the  big  lion?" 
or  "What  a  lovely  camp  that  was  under  the 
big  tree  in  the  Lado  when  we  were  hunting  the 
giant  eland?" 

We  get  three  sorts  and  periods  of  enjoyment 
out  of  a  hunting  trip.  The  first  is  when  the 
plans  are  being  discussed  and  the  outfit  assem- 
bled; this  is  the  pleasure  of  anticipation.  The 
second  is  the  enjoyment  of  the  actual  trip  it- 
self; and  the  third  is  the  pleasure  of  retrospec- 
tion when  we  sit  round  a  blazing  wood-fire 
and  talk  over  the  incidents  and  adventures  of 
the  trip.  There  is  no  general  rule  to  know 
which  of  the  three  gives  the  keenest  joy.  I 
can  think  of  a  different  expedition  in  which 
each  sort  stands  out  in  pre-eminence.  Even 
if  the  trip  has  been  exceptionally  hard  and  the 


24    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

luck  unusually  bad,  the  pleasures  of  anticipa- 
tion and  preparation  cannot  be  taken  away, 
and  frequently  the  retrospect  is  the  more  satis- 
factory because  of  the  difficulties  and  discom- 
forts surmounted. 

I  think  we  enjoyed  the  African  trip  most  in 
the  actuality,  and  that  is  saying  a  great  deal. 
It  was  a  wonderful  "adventure"  and  all  the 
world  seemed  young.  Father  has  quoted  in  the 
foreword  to  African  Game  Trails:  "I  speak 
of  Africa  and  golden  joys."  It  was  a  line 
that  I  have  heard  him  repeat  to  himself  many 
times.  In  Africa  everything  was  new.  He 
revelled  in  the  vast  plains  blackened  with  herds 
of  grazing  antelope.  From  his  exhaustive 
reading  and  retentive  memory  he  knew  al- 
ready the  history  and  the  habits  of  the  dif- 
ferent species  of  game.  When  we  left  camp 
in  the  early  morning  we  never  could  foretell 
what  we  would  run  into  by  nightfall — we  were 
prepared  for  anything  from  an  elephant  to 
a  dik-dik — the  graceful  diminutive  antelope 
no  larger  than  a  hare.  In  the  evening,  after 
we  had  eaten  we  would  gather  round  the  camp- 
fire — ^for  in  the  highlands  the  evenings  were 
chilly — and  each  would  tell  the  adventures  of 
his  day,  and  discuss  plans  for  the  morrow. 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    25 

Then  we  would  start  paralleling  and  compar- 
ing. Father  would  illustrate  with  adventures 
of  the  old  days  in  our  West;  Cuninghame 
from  the  lore  gathered  during  his  twenty  years 
in  Africa  would  relate  some  anecdote,  and 
Mearns  would  talk  of  life  among  the  wild 
tribes  in  the  Philippines. 

Colonel  Mearns  belonged  to  the  medical 
corps  in  the  army.  He  had  come  with  us  as 
an  ornithologist,  for  throughout  his  military 
career  he  had  been  actively  interested  in  send- 
ing specimens  from  wherever  he  was  serving 
to  the  Smithsonian  National  Museum  in  Wash- 
ington. His  mild  manner  belied  his  fearless 
and  intrepid  disposition.  A  member  of  the 
expedition  once  came  into  camp  with  an  ac- 
count of  the  doctor,  whom  he  had  just  run 
across — looking  too  benevolent  for  this  world, 
engaged  in  what  our  companion  described  as 
''slaughtering  humming-birds,  pursuing  them 
from  bush  to  bush."  One  of  his  Philippine 
adventures  filled  us  with  a  delighted  interest 
for  which  I  don't  believe  he  fully  appreciated 
the  reason.  He  told  us  how  with  a  small  force 
he  had  been  hemmed  in  by  a  large  number  of 
Moros.  The  Americans  took  refuge  in  a 
stockade  on  a  hilltop.     The  Moros  advanced 


26    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

time  and  again  with  the  greatest  gallantry, 
and  Mearns  explained  how  sorry  he  felt  for 
them  as  they  fell — some  under  the  very  walls 
of  the  stockade.  In  a  musing  tone  at  the 
end  he  added:  "I  slipped  out  of  the  stockade 
that  night  and  collected  a  most  interesting 
series  of  skulls;  they're  in  the  Smithsonian 
to-day." 

Father  was  the  rare  combination  of  a  born 
raconteur — with  the  gift  of  putting  in  all  the 
little  details  that  make  a  story — and  an  equally 
good  listener.  He  was  an  adept  at  drawing 
people  out.  His  interest  was  so  whole-hearted 
and  obvious  that  the  shyest,  most  tongue- 
tied  adventurer  found  himself  speaking  with 
entire  freedom.  Every  one  with  whom  we  came 
in  contact  fell  under  the  charm.  Father  in- 
variably thought  the  best  of  a  person,  and  for 
that  very  reason  every  one  was  at  his  best  with 
him — and  felt  bound  to  justify  his  confidence 
and  judgment.  With  him  I  always  thought 
of  the  Scotch  story  of  the  MacGregor  who, 
when  a  friend  told  him  that  it  was  an  outrage 
that  at  a  certain  banquet  he  should  have  been 
given  a  seat  half-way  down  the  table,  replied: 
*' Where  the  MacGregor  sits  is  the  head  of  the 
table ! "     Where  father  sat  was  always  the  head 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    %1 

of  the  table,  and  yet  he  treated  every  one  with 
the  same  courtesy  and  simpHcity,  whether  it 
was  the  governor  of  the  Protectorate  or  the 
poorest  Boer  settler.  I  remember  how  amazed 
some  were  at  the  lack  of  formality  in  his  rela- 
tionship with  the  members  of  the  expedition. 
Many  people  who  have  held  high  positions 
feel  it  incumbent  on  them  to  maintain  a  cer- 
tain distance  in  their  dealings  with  their  less 
illustrious  fellow  men.  If  they  let  down  the 
barrier  they  feel,  they  would  lose  dignity. 
They  are  generally  right,  for  their  superiority 
is  not  innate,  but  the  result  of  chance.  With 
father  it  was  otherwise.  The  respect  and 
consideration  felt  for  him  could  not  have  been 
greater,  and  would  certainly  not  have  been 
so  sincere,  had  he  built  a  seven-foot  barrier 
about  himself. 

He  was  most  essentially  unselfish,  and  wanted 
no  more  than  would  have  been  his  just  due  if 
the  expedition,  instead  of  being  owing  entirely 
to  him,  both  financially  and  otherwise,  had 
been  planned  and  carried  out  by  all  of  us. 
He  was  a  natural  champion  of  the  cause  of 
every  man,  and  not  only  in  his  books  would  he 
carefully  give  credit  where  it  was  due,  but  he 
would   endeavor   to   bring   about   recognition 


28    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

through  outside  channels.  Thus  he  felt  that 
Colonel  Rondon  deserved  wide  acknowledg- 
ment for  the  years  of  exploring  in  the  Brazilian 
Hinterland;  and  he  brought  it  to  the  attention 
of  the  American  and  British  Geographical 
Societies.  As  a  result,  the  former  awarded 
the  gold  medal  to  Colonel  Rondon.  In  the 
same  way  father  championed  the  cause  of 
the  naturalists  who  went  with  him  on  his  ex- 
peditions. He  did  his  best  to  see  that  the 
museums  to  which  they  belonged  should  ap- 
preciate their  services,  and  give  them  the  op- 
portunity to  follow  the  results  through.  When 
an  expedition  brings  back  material  that  has 
not  been  described,  the  museum  publishes 
pamphlets  listing  the  new  species,  and  explain- 
ing their  habitats  and  characteristics.  This 
is  rarely  done  by  the  man  who  did  the  actual 
collecting.  Father,  whenever  it  was  feasible, 
arranged  for  the  naturalists  who  had  accom- 
panied or  taken  part  in  the  collecting  to  have 
the  credit  of  writing  the  pamphlets  describing 
the  results  of  their  work.  To  a  layman  this 
would  not  seem  much,  but  in  reality  it  means 
a  great  deal.  Father  did  all  he  could  to  en- 
courage his  companions  to  write  their  experi- 
ences, for  most  of  them  had  led  eventful  lives 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    29 

filled  with  unusual  incident.  When,  as  is 
often  the  case,  the  actor  did  not  have  the  power 
of  written  narrative,  father  would  be  the  first 
to  recognize  it,  and  knew  that  if  inadequately 
described,  the  most  eventful  careers  may  be 
of  no  more  interest  than  the  catalogue  of  ships 
in  the  Odyssey^  or  the  "'begat"  chapters  in  the 
Bible.  If,  however,  father  felt  that  there  ex- 
isted a  genuine  ability  to  write,  he  would  spare 
no  efforts  to  place  the  articles;  in  some  cases 
he  would  write  introductions,  and  in  others, 
reviews  of  the  book,  if  the  results  attained  to 
that  proportion. 

One  of  the  most  careful  preparations  that 
father  made  for  the  African  expedition  was 
the  choosing  of  the  library.  He  selected  as 
wide  a  range  as  possible,  getting  the  smallest 
copy  of  each  book  that  was  obtainable  with 
decent  reading  type.  He  wanted  a  certain 
number  of  volumes  mainly  for  the  contrast 
to  the  daily  life.  He  told  me  that  he  had 
particularly  enjoyed  Swinburne  and  Shelley 
in  ranching  days  in  the  Bad  Lands,  because 
they  were  so  totally  foreign  to  the  life  and  the 
country — and  supplied  an  excellent  antidote 
to  the  daily  round.  Father  read  so  rapidly 
that  he  had  to  plan  very  carefully  in  order  to 


30    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

have  enough  books  to  last  him  through  a 
trip.  He  Hked  to  have  a  mixture  of  serious 
and  Ught  hterature — chaff,  as  he  called  the 
latter.  When  he  had  been  reading  histories 
and  scientific  discussions  and  political  treatises 
for  a  certain  length  of  time,  he  would  plunge 
into  an  orgy  of  detective  stories  and  novels 
about  people  cast  away  on  desert  islands. 

The  plans  for  the  Brazilian  expedition  came 
into  being  so  unexpectedly  that  he  could 
not  choose  his  library  with  the  usual  care. 
He  brought  Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall  of  the 
Roman  Empire  in  the  Everyman's  edition, 
and  farmed  out  a  volume  to  each  of  us,  and 
most  satisfactory  it  proved  to  all.  He  also 
brought  Marcus  Aurelius  and  EpictetuSy  but 
when  he  tried  to  read  them  during  the  descent 
of  the  Rio  da  Duvida,  they  only  served  to  fill 
him  with  indignation  at  their  futility.  Some 
translations  of  Greek  plays,  not  those  of  Gil- 
bert Murray,  for  which  he  had  unstinted  praise, 
met  with  but  little  better  success,  and  we  were 
nearly  as  badly  off  for  reading  matter  as  we 
were  for  provisions.  I  had  brought  along  a 
selection  of  Portuguese  classics  and  a  number 
of  French  novels.  The  former  were  useless 
to  father,  but  Henri  Bordeaux  and  Maurice 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    31 

Leblanc  were  grist  to  the  mill.  It  was  father's 
jSrst  introduction  to  Arsene,  and  he  thoroughly- 
enjoyed  it — he  liked  the  style,  although  for 
matter  he  preferred  Conan  Doyle.  Father 
never  cared  very  much  about  French  novels — 
the  French  books  that  he  read  most  were 
scientific  volumes — ^histories  of  the  Mongols — 
and  an  occasional  hunting  book,  but  he  after- 
ward became  a  great  admirer  of  Henri  Bor- 
deaux. 

At  last  the  time  came  when  there  was 
nothing  left  but  the  Oxford  books  of  English 
and  French  verse.  The  one  of  English  verse 
he  had  always  disliked.  He  said  that  if  there 
were  to  be  any  American  poetry  included,  it 
should  be  at  any  rate  a  good  selection.  The 
choice  from  Longfellow's  poems  appealed  to 
him  as  particularly  poor,  and  I  think  that  it 
was  for  this  reason  that  he  disapproved  of  the 
whole  collection.  Be  that  as  it  may,  I  realized 
how  hard  up  for  something  to  read  father  must 
be  when  he  asked  me  for  my  Oxford  book  of 
English  verse.  For  French  verse  father  had 
never  cared.  He  said  it  didn't  sing  suflSciently. 
"The  Song  of  Roland"  was  the  one  exception 
he  granted.  It  was,  therefore,  a  still  greater 
proof  of  distress  when  he  borrowed  the  Oxford 


32    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

book  of  French  verse.  He  always  loved  to 
tell  afterward  that  when  he  first  borrowed  it 
he  started  criticising  and  I  had  threatened  to 
take  it  away  if  he  continued  to  assail  my 
favorites.  In  spite  of  all  this  he  found  it  in- 
finitely preferable  to  Epidetus  and  Marcus 
AureliuSy  and,  indeed,  became  very  fond  of 
some  of  the  selections.  Villon  and  Ronsard 
particularly  interested  him. 

When  riding  along  through  the  wilderness 
father  would  often  repeat  poetry  to  himself. 
To  learn  a  poem  he  had  only  to  read  it  through 
a  few  times,  and  he  seemed  never  to  forget 
it.  Sometimes  we  would  repeat  the  poem  to- 
gether. It  might  be  parts  of  the  "Saga  of  King 
Olaf,"  or  Kipling's  "Rhyme  of  the  Three 
Sealers,"  or  "Grave  of  a  Hundred  Head,"  or, 
perhaps,  "The  Bell  Buoy" — or  again  it  might 
be  something  from  Swinburne  or  Shelley  or 
Keats — or  the  "Ballad  of  Judas  Iscariot."  He 
was  above  all  fond  of  the  poetry  of  the  open, 
and  I  think  we  children  got  much  of  our  love 
for  the  outdoor  life,  not  only  from  actual  ex- 
ample, but  from  the  poetry  that  father  taught 
us. 

There  was  an  Indissoluble  bond  between 
him  and  any  of  his  old  hunting  companions, 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    33 

and  in  no  matter  what  part  of  the  world  he 
met  them,  all  else  was  temporarily  forgotten 
in  the  eager  exchange  of  reminiscences  of  old 
days.  On  the  return  from  Africa,  Seth  Bul- 
lock, of  Deadwood,  met  us  in  London.  How 
delighted  father  was  to  see  him,  and  how  he 
enjoyed  the  captain's  comments  on  England 
and  things  English  !  One  of  the  captain's  first 
remarks  on  reaching  London  was  to  the  ef- 
fect that  he  was  so  glad  to  see  father  that  he 
felt  like  hanging  his  hat  on  the  dome  of  Saint 
Paul's  and  shooting  it  off.  We  were  reminded 
of  Artemus  Ward's  classic  reply  to  the  guard 
who  found  him  tapping,  with  his  cane,  an  in- 
scription in  Westminster  Abbey:  "Come, 
come,  sir,  you  mustn't  do  that.  It  isn't  per- 
mitted, you  know!"  Whereupon  Artemus 
Ward  turned  upon  him:  "What,  mustn't  do 
it.^  If  I  like  it,  I'll  buy  it!"  It  was  never 
difficult  to  trail  the  captain.  When  my  sister 
and  I  were  going  through  Edinburgh  Castle, 
the  local  guide  showed  us  an  ancient  gun, 
firing  a  cluster  of  five  or  six  barrels.  With 
great  amusement  he  told  us  how  an  American 
to  whom  he  was  showing  the  piece  a  few  days 
previously  had  remarked  that  to  be  shot  at 
with  that  gun  must  be  like  taking  a  shower- 


34    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

bath.  A  few  questions  served  to  justify  the 
conclusion  we  had  immediately  formed  as  to 
the  identity  of  our  predecessor.  Father  had 
him  invited  to  the  dinner  given  by  the  donors 
of  the  Holland  &  Holland  elephant  rifle. 

Of  the  hunting  comrades  of  his  early  days, 
he  told  me  that  Mr.  R.  H.  Munro  Ferguson 
was  the  most  satisfactory  of  all,  for  he  met 
all  requirements — always  good-humored  when 
things  went  wrong,  possessing  a  keen  sense  of 
humor,  understanding  the  value  of  silent  com- 
panionship, and  so  well  read  and  informed  as 
to  be  able  to  discuss  appreciatively  any  of  the 
multitudinous  questions  of  literature  or  world 
affairs  that  interested  my  father. 

In  Washington  when  an  old  companion 
turned  up  he  would  be  triumphantly  borne  oflF 
to  lunch,  to  find  himself  surrounded  by  famous 
scientists,  authors,  senators,  and  foreign  dip- 
lomats. Father  would  shift  with  lightning  ra- 
pidity from  one  to  the  other — first  he  might 
be  discussing  some  question  of  Indian  policy 
and  administration,  next  the  attitude  of  a 
foreign  power — then  an  author's  latest  novel — 
and  a  few  moments  later,  he  would  have  led 
on  Johnny  Goff  to  telling  an  experience  with 
the  cougar  hounds. 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    35 

Any  man  who  had  hunted  with  father  was 
ready  to  follow  him  to  the  ends  of  the  earth, 
and  no  passage  of  time  could  diminish  his 
loyalty.  With  father  the  personal  equation 
counted  for  so  much.  He  was  so  whole- 
heartedly interested  in  his  companions — ^in 
their  aspirations  and  achievements.  In  every 
detail  he  was  keenly  interested,  and  he  would 
select  from  his  library  those  volumes  which 
he  thought  would  most  interest  each  compan- 
ion, and,  perhaps,  develop  in  him  the  love 
of  the  wonderful  avocation  which  he  himself 
found  in  reading.  His  efforts  were  not  al- 
ways crowned  with  success.  Father  felt  that 
our  African  companion,  R.  J.  Cuninghame,  the 
"Bearded  Master,"  as  the  natives  called  him, 
being  Scotch  should  be  interested  in  Scott's 
novels,  so  he  selected  from  the  "Pigskin  Li- 
brary" a  copy  of  one  of  them — Waverley,  I 
think  it  was.  For  some  weeks  Cuninghame 
made  progress,  not  rapid,  it  is  true,  for  he 
confessed  to  finding  the  notes  the  most  in- 
teresting part  of  the  book,  then  one  day  when 
they  were  sitting  under  a  tree  together  in  a 
rest  during  the  noonday  heat,  and  father  in 
accordance  with  his  invariable  custom  took  out 
a  book  from  his  saddle-pocket,  R.  J.  produced 


36    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

Waverley  and  started  industriously  to  work  on 
it.  Father  looked  over  his  shoulder  to  see 
where  he  had  got  to,  and  to  his  amused  de- 
hght  found  that  Cuninghame  had  been  losing 
ground — ^he  was  three  chapters  farther  back 
than  he  had  been  two  weeks  before ! 

We  more  than  once  had  occasion  to  realize 
how  largely  the  setting  is  responsible  for  much 
that  we  enjoy  in  the  wilds.  Father  had  told 
me  of  how  he  used  to  describe  the  bellowing 
of  the  bull  elk  as  he  would  hear  it  ring  out  in 
the  frozen  stillness  of  the  forests  of  Wyoming. 
He  thought  of  it,  and  talked  of  it,  as  a  weird, 
romantic  call — until  one  day  when  he  was 
walking  through  the  zoological  gardens  ac- 
companied by  the  very  person  to  whom  he  had 
so  often  given  the  description.  As  they  passed 
the  wapitis'  enclosure,  a  bull  bellowed,  and 
father's  illusions  and  credit  were  simultane- 
ously shattered,  for  the  romantic  call  he  had 
so  often  dwelt  upon  was,  in  a  zoological  park, 
nothing  more  than  a  loud  and  discordant  sort 
of  bray. 

In  spite  of  this  lesson  we  would  see  some- 
thing among  the  natives  that  was  interesting 
or  unusual  and  get  it  to  bring  home,  only  to 
find  that  it  was  the  exotic  surroundings  that 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    37 

had  been  responsible  for  a  totally  fictitious 
charm.  A  wild  hill  tribe  in  Africa  use  anklets 
made  from  the  skin  of  the  colobus,  a  graceful, 
long-haired  monkey  colored  black  and  white. 
When  father  produced  the  anklets  at  home, 
the  only  thing  really  noticeable  about  them 
was  the  fact  that  they  smelt ! 

Another  equally  unfortunate  case  was  the 
affair  of  the  beehives.  The  same  hill  tribe 
was  very  partial  to  honey.  An  individual's 
wealth  was  computed  in  the  number  of  bee- 
hives that  he  possessed.  They  were  made 
out  of  hollowed  logs  three  or  four  feet  long 
and  eight  or  ten  inches  in  diameter.  A  wife 
or  a  cow  was  bought  for  an  agreed  upon  num- 
ber of  beehives,  and  when  we  were  hunting,  no 
matter  how  hot  the  trail  might  be,  the  native 
tracker  would,  if  we  came  to  a  clearing  and 
saw  some  bees  hovering  about  the  forest  flow- 
ers, halt  and  offer  up  a  prayer  that  the  bees 
should  deposit  the  honey  in  one  of  his  hives. 
It  seemed  natural  to  bring  a  hive  home,  but 
viewed  in  the  uncompromising  light  of  the 
North  Shore  of  Long  Island  it  was  merely  a 
characterless,  uninteresting  log. 

Not  the  least  of  the  many  delights  of  being 
a   hunting    companion    of    father's    was   his 


38    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

humor.  No  one  could  tell  a  better  story, 
whether  it  was  what  he  used  to  call  one  of 
his  "old  grouse  in  the  gunroom"  stories,  or 
an  account,  with  sidelights,  of  a  contempo- 
raneous adventure.  The  former  had  to  do 
with  incidents  in  his  early  career  in  the  cow- 
camps  of  the  Dakotas,  or  later  on  with  the 
regiment  in  Cuba — and  phrases  and  incidents 
of  them  soon  became  coin-current  in  the  ex- 
pedition. Father's  humor  was  never  under 
any  circumstances  ill-natured,  or  of  such  a 
sort  as  might  make  its  object  feel  uncomforta- 
ble. If  anything  amusing  occurred  to  a  mem- 
ber of  the  expedition,  father  would  embroider 
the  happening  in  inimitable  fashion,  but  al- 
ways in  such  a  way  that  the  victim  himself  was 
the  person  most  amused.  The  accompanying 
drawing  will  serve  as  illustration.  Father  and 
I  had  gone  out  to  get  some  buck  to  eke  out  the 
food-supply  for  the  porters.  We  separated, 
but  some  time  later  I  caught  sight  of  father 
and  thought  I  would  join  him  and  return  to 
camp.  I  didn't  pay  particular  attention  to 
what  he  was  doing,  and  as  he  was  some  way 
off  I  failed  to  notice  that  he  was  walking 
stooped  to  keep  concealed  by  a  rise  of  ground 
from  some  buck  he  was  stalking.  The  result 
was  the  picture. 


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THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    39 

Before  we  started  on  the  serious  exploring 
part  of  the  Brazilian  trip,  we  paid  visits  to 
several  fazendas  or  ranches  in  the  state  of 
Matto  Grosso,  with  the  purpose  of  hunting 
jaguar,  as  well  as  the  lesser  game  of  the  coun- 
try. One  of  the  fazendas  at  which  we  stayed 
belonged  to  the  governor  of  the  state.  When 
we  were  wakened  before  daylight  to  start  off 
on  the  hunt  we  were  given,  in  Brazilian  fashion, 
the  small  cup  of  black  coflFee  and  piece  of  bread 
which  constitutes  the  native  Brazilian  break- 
fast. We  would  then  sally  forth  to  return 
to  the  ranch  not  before  noon,  and  sometimes 
much  later,  as  the  hunting  luck  dictated. 
We  would  find  an  enormous  lunch  waiting  for 
us  at  the  house.  Father,  who  was  accustomed 
to  an  American  breakfast,  remarked  regret- 
fully that  he  wished  the  lunch  were  divided, 
or  that  at  least  part  of  it  were  used  to  supple- 
ment the  black  coflFee  of  daybreak.  The  sec- 
ond morning,  as  I  went  down  the  hall,  the 
dining-room  door  was  ajar,  and  I  caught  sight 
of  the  table  laden  with  the  cold  meats  and 
salads  that  were  to  serve  as  part  of  our  elabo- 
rate luncheon  many  dim  hours  hence.  I 
hurried  back  to  tell  father,  and  we  tiptoed 
cautiously  into  the  dining-room,  closing  the 


40    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

door  noiselessly  behind  us.  While  we  were 
engaged  in  making  rapid  despatch  of  a  cold 
chicken,  we  heard  our  hosts  calling,  and  the 
next  minute  the  head  of  the  house  popped  in 
the  door!  As  father  said  afterward,  we  felt 
and  looked  like  two  small  boys  caught  stealing 
jam  in  the  pantry. 

The  Brazilian  exploration  was  not  so  care- 
fully planned  as  the  African  trip,  because 
father  had  not  intended  to  make  much  of  an 
expedition.  The  first  time  he  mentioned  the 
idea  was  in  April,  1913,  in  reply  to  a  letter  I 
wrote  from  Sao  Paulo  describing  a  short  hunt- 
ing expedition  that  I  had  made.  "The  forest 
must  be  lovely;  some  time  I  must  get  down  to 
see  you,  and  we'll  take  a  fortnight's  outing, 
and  you  shall  hunt  and  I'll  act  as  what  in  the 
North  Woods  we  used  to  call  'Wangan  man,' 
and  keep  camp!" 

Four  months  later  he  wrote  that  he  was 
planning  to  come  down  and  see  me;  that  he 
had  been  asked  to  make  addresses  in  Brazil, 
Argentina,  and  Chile,  and  "I  shall  take  a 
naturalist  with  me,  if,  as  I  hope,  I  return  via 
Paraguay  and  the  Amazon."  At  the  time  it 
did  not  look  as  if  it  would  be  possible  for  me  to 
go  on  the  trip.     In  father's  next  letter  he  said 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    41 

that  after  he  left  me,  "instead  of  returning  in 
the  ordinary  tourist  Bryan-Bryce-way,  I  am 
going  to  see  if  it  is  possible  to  work  across  from 
the  Plata  into  the  valley  of  the  Amazon,  and 
come  out  through  the  Brazilian  forest.  This 
may  not  be  possible.  It  won't  be  anything  like 
our  African  trip.  There  will  be  no  hunting 
and  no  adventures,  so  that  I  shall  not  have  the 
pang  I  otherwise  would  about  not  taking  you 
along."  These  plans  were  amplified  and  ex- 
tended a  certain  amount,  but  in  the  last  letter 
I  received  they  didn't  include  a  very  serious 
expedition. 

"I  shall  take  the  Springfield  and  the  Fox 
on  my  trip,  but  I  shall  not  expect  to  do  any 
game-shooting.  I  think  it  would  need  the 
Bwana  Merodadi,  [My  name  among  the  na- 
tives in  Africa]  and  not  his  stout  and  rheumatic 
elderly  parent  to  do  hunting  in  the  Brazilian 
forest.  I  shall  have  a  couple  of  naturalists 
with  me  of  the  Heller  stamp,  and  I  shall  hope 
to  get  a  fair  collection  for  the  New  York 
Museum — Fairfield  Osborn's  museum." 

It  was  at  Rio  that  father  first  heard  of  the 
River  of  Doubt.  Colonel  Rondon  in  an  ex- 
ploring expedition  had  crossed  a  large  river 
and  no  one  knew  where  it  went  to.    Father 


42    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

felt  that  to  build  dugouts  and  descend  the 
river  offered  a  chance  to  accomplish  some  gen- 
uine and  interesting  exploration.  It  was  more 
of  a  trip  than  he  had  planned  for,  but  the 
Brazilian  Government  arranged  for  Colonel 
Rondon  to  make  up  an  accompanying  expedi- 
tion. 

When  father  went  off  into  the  wilds  he  was 
apt  to  be  worried  until  he  had  done  some- 
thing which  would  in  his  mind  justify  the  ex- 
pedition and  relieve  it  from  the  danger  of  being 
a  fiasco.  In  Africa  he  wished  to  get  at  least 
one  specimen  each  of  the  four  great  prizes — 
the  lion,  the  elephant,  the  buffalo,  and  the 
rhinoceros.  It  was  the  lion  for  which  he  was 
most  keen — and  which  he  also  felt  was  the 
most  problematical.  Luck  was  with  us,  and 
we  had  not  been  hunting  many  days  before 
father's  ambition  was  fulfilled.  It  was  some- 
thing that  he  had  long  desired — indeed  it  is 
the  pinnacle  of  most  hunters'  ambitions — 
so  it  was  a  happy  cavalcade  that  rode  back  to 
camp  in  the  wake  of  the  natives  that  were 
carrying  the  lioness  slung  on  a  long  pole. 
The  blacks  were  chanting  a  native  song  of 
triumph,  and  father  was  singing  "  Whack-fa-lal 
for  Lannigan's  Ball,"  as  a  sort  of  "chant  pagan." 


d    ft, 

C       OS 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    43 

Father  was  more  fluent  than  exact  in  ex- 
pressing himself  in  foreign  languages.  As  he 
himself  said  of  his  French,  he  spoke  it  "as  if 
it  were  a  non- Aryan  tongue,  having  neither  gen- 
der nor  tense."  He  would,  however,  always 
manage  to  make  himself  understood,  and  never 
seemed  to  experience  any  diflBculty  in  under- 
standing his  interlocutor.  In  Africa  he  had 
a  most  complicated  combination  of  sign-lan- 
guage and  coined  words,  and  though  I  could 
rarely  make  out  what  he  and  his  gun-bearer 
were  talking  about,  they  never  appeared  to 
have  any  difficulty  dn  understanding  each  other. 
Father  could  read  Spanish,  and  he  had  not 
been  in  Brazil  long  before  he  could  make  out 
the  trend  of  any  conversation  in  Portuguese. 
With  the  Brazilians  he  always  spoke  French, 
or,  on  rare  occasions,  German. 

He  was  most  conscientious  about  his  writing. 
Almost  every  day  when  he  came  in  from  hunt- 
ing he  would  settle  down  to  work  on  the  articles 
that  were  from  time  to  time  sent  back  to 
Scribner's.  This  daily  task  was  far  more 
onerous  than  any  one  who  has  not  tried  it 
can  imagine.  When  you  come  in  from  a  long 
day's  tramping,  you  feel  most  uninclined  to 
concentrate  on  writing  a  careful  and  interest- 


44    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

ing  account  of  the  day's  activities.  Father 
was  invariably  good-humored  about  it,  say- 
ing that  he  was  paying  for  his  fun.  In  Brazil 
when  the  mosquitoes  and  sand-flies  were  in- 
tolerable, he  used  to  be  forced  to  write  swathed 
in  a  mosquito  veil  and  with  long  gauntlets  to 
protect  hands  and  wrists. 

During  the  descent  of  the  River  of  Doubt  in 
Brazil  there  were  many  black  moments.  It 
was  impossible  to  hazard  a  guess  within  a 
month  or  more  as  to  when  we  would  get  through 
to  the  Amazon.  We  had  dugout  canoes, 
and  when  we  came  to  serious  rapids  or  water- 
falls we  were  forced  to  cut  a  trail  around  to 
the  quiet  water  below.  Then  we  must  make 
a  corduroy  road  with  the  trunks  of  trees  over 
which  to  haul  the  dugouts.  All  this  took  a 
long  time,  and  in  some  places  where  the  river 
ran  through  gorges  it  was  almost  impossible. 
We  lost  in  all  six  of  the  ten  canoes  with  which 
we  started,  and  of  course  much  of  our  food- 
supply  and  general  equipment.  It  was  neces- 
sary to  delay  and  build  two  more  canoes — a 
doubly  laborious  task  because  of  the  axes 
and  adzes  which  had  gone  down  in  the  ship- 
wrecks. The  Brazil  nuts  upon  which  we  had 
been  counting  to  help  out  our  food-supply  had 


o 


00 

a 
h-3 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    45 

had  an  off  year.  If  this  had  not  been  so  we 
would  have  fared  by  no  means  badly,  for  these 
nuts  may  be  ground  into  flour  or  roasted  or 
prepared  in  a  number  of  different  ways.  An- 
other source  upon  which  we  counted  failed 
us  when  we  found  that  there  were  scarcely 
any  fish  in  the  river.  For  some  inexpHcable 
reason  many  of  the  tributaries  of  the  Amazon 
teem  with  fish,  while  others  flowing  through 
similar  country  and  under  parallel  conditions 
contain  practically  none.  We  went  first  onto 
half  rations,  and  then  were  forced  to  still 
further  reduce  the  issue.  We  had  only  the 
clothes  in  which  we  stood  and  were  wet  all 
day  and  slept  wet  throughout  the  night. 
There  would  be  a  heavy  downpour,  then  out 
would  come  the  sun  and  we  would  be  steamed 
dry,  only  to  be  drenched  once  more  a  half -hour 
later. 

Working  waist-deep  in  the  water  in  an  at- 
tempt to  dislodge  a  canoe  that  had  been  thrown 
upon  some  rocks  out  in  the  stream,  father 
slipped,  and,  of  course,  it  was  his  weak  leg  that 
suffered.  Then  he  came  down  with  fever,  and 
in  his  weakened  condition  was  attacked  with 
a  veritable  plague  of  deep  abscesses.  It  can 
be  readily  understood  that  the  entourage  and 


46    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

environment  were  about  as  unsuitable  for  a 
sick  man  as  any  that  could  be  imagined.  Noth- 
ing but  father's  indomitable  spirit  brought 
him  through.  He  was  not  to  be  downed  by 
anything,  although  he  knew  well  that  the 
chances  were  against  his  coming  out.  He 
made  up  his  mind  that  as  long  as  he  could,  he 
would  go  along,  but  that  once  he  could  no 
longer  travel,  and  held  up  the  expedition,  he 
would  arrange  for  us  to  go  on  without  hinu 
Of  course  he  did  not  at  the  time  tell  us  this, 
but  he  reasoned  that  with  our  very  limited 
supply  of  provisions,  and  the  impossibility  of 
living  on  the  country,  if  the  expedition  halted 
it  would  not  only  be  of  no  avail  as  far  as  he 
was  concerned,  but  the  chances  would  be 
strongly  in  favor  of  no  one  coming  through. 
With  it  all  he  was  invariably  cheerful,  and  in 
the  blackest  times  ever  ready  with  a  joke. 
Sick  as  he  was,  he  gave  no  one  any  trouble. 
He  would  walk  slowly  over  the  portages,  rest- 
ing every  little  while,  and  when  the  fever  was 
not  too  severe  we  would,  when  we  reached  the 
farther  end  with  the  canoes,  find  him  sitting 
propped  against  a  tree  reading  a  volume  of 
Gibbon,  or  perhaps  the  Oxford  book  of  verse. 
There   was   one   particularly   black   night; 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    47 

one  of  our  best  men  had  been  shot  and  killed 
by  a  useless  devil  who  escaped  into  the  jungle, 
where  he  was  undoubtedly  killed  by  the  In- 
dians. We  had  been  working  through  a  series 
of  rapids  that  seemed  interminable.  There 
would  be  a  long  carry,  a  mile  or  so  clear  go- 
ing, and  then  more  rapids.  The  fever  was 
high  and  father  was  out  of  his  head.  Doctor 
Cajazeira,  who  was  one  of  the  three  Brazilians 
with  us,  divided  with  me  the  watch  during  the 
night.  The  scene  is  vivid  before  me.  The 
black  rushing  river  with  the  great  trees  tower- 
ing high  above  along  the  bank;  the  sodden 
earth  under  foot;  for  a  few  moments  the  stars 
would  be  shining,  and  then  the  sky  would 
cloud  over  and  the  rain  would  fall  in  torrents, 
shutting  out  sky  and  trees  and  river.  Father 
first  began  with  poetry;  over  and  over  again 
he  repeated  "In  Xanadu  did  Kubla  Khan  a 
stately  pleasure  dome  decree,"  then  he  started 
talking  at  random,  but  gradually  he  centred 
down  to  the  question  of  supplies,  which  was,  of 
course,  occupying  every  one's  mind.  Part  of 
the  time  he  knew  that  I  was  there,  and  he 
would  then  ask  me  if  I  thought  Cherrie  had 
had  enough  to  eat  to  keep  going.  Then  he 
would  forget  my  presence  and  keep  saying  to 


48    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

himself:  "I  can't  work  now,  so  I  don't  need 
much  food,  but  he  and  Cherrie  have  worked 
all  day  with  the  canoes,  they  must  have  part 
of  mine."  Then  he  would  again  realize  my 
presence  and  question  me  as  to  just  how  much 
Cherrie  had  had.  How  good  faithful  Ca- 
jazeira  waked  I  do  not  know,  but  when  his 
watch  was  due  I  felt  him  tap  me  on  the  shoul- 
der, and  crawled  into  my  soggy  hammock  to 
sleep  the  sleep  of  the  dead. 

Father's  courage  was  an  inspiration  never  to 
be  forgotten  by  any  of  us;  without  a  murmur 
he  would  lie  while  Cajazeira  lanced  and  drained 
the  abscesses.  When  we  got  down  beyond 
the  rapids  the  river  widened  so  that  instead  of 
seeing  the  sun  through  the  canyon  of  the  trees 
for  but  a  few  hours  each  day,  it  hung  above  us 
all  the  day  like  a  molten  ball  and  broiled  us 
as  if  the  river  were  a  grid  on  which  we  were 
made  fast.  To  a  sick  man  it  must  have  been 
intolerable. 

It  is  when  one  is  sick  that  one  really  longs 
for  home.  Lying  in  a  hammock  all  unwashed 
and  unshaven,  suffocating  beneath  a  mos- 
quitb-net,  or  tortured  by  mosquitoes  and  sand- 
flies when  one  raises  the  net  to  let  in  a  breath 
of  air — it  is  then  that  on^  dreams  of  clean 


THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS    49 

pajamas  and  cool  sheets  and  iced  water.  I 
have  often  heard  father  say  when  he  was 
having  a  bout  of  fever  at  home,  that  it  was 
ahnost  a  pleasure  to  be  ill,  particularly  when 
you  thought  of  all  the  past  discomforts  of 
fever  in  the  wilds. 

Father's  disappointment  at  not  being  able  to 
take  a  physical  part  in  the  war — as  he  has 
said,  'Ho  pay  with  his  body  for  his  soul's  de- 
sire"— was  bitter.  Strongly  as  he  felt  about 
going,  I  doubt  if  his  disappointment  was  much 
more  keen  than  that  of  the  British  and  French 
statesmen  and  generals,  who  so  readily  realized 
what  his  presence  would  mean  to  the  Allied 
cause,  and  more  than  once  requested  in  Wash- 
ington that  he  be  sent.  Marshal  Joffre  made 
such  a  request  in  person,  meeting  with  the 
usual  evasive  reply.  Father  took  his  disap- 
pointment as  he  had  taken  many  another  in 
his  life,  without  letting  it  harm  his  usefulness, 
or  discourage  his  aggressive  energy.  "In  the 
fell  clutch  of  circumstance  he  did  not  wince 
or  cry  aloud."  Indeed,  the  whole  of  Henley's 
poem  might  well  apply  to  father  if  it  were 
possible  to  eliminate  from  it  the  unfortunate 
marring  undercurrent  of  braggadocio  with 
which  father's  attitude  was  never  for  an  in- 


50    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

slant  tinged.  With  the  indomitable  courage 
that  knew  no  deterrent  he  continued  to  fight 
his  battle  on  this  side  to  make  America's 
entry  no  empty  action,  as  it  threatened  to  be. 
He  wrote  me  that  he  had  hoped  that  I  would 
be  with  him  in  this  greatest  adventure  of  all, 
but  that  since  it  was  not  to  be,  he  could  only 
be  thankful  that  his  four  boys  were  permitted 
to  do  their  part  in  the  actual  fighting. 

When  in  a  little  town  in  Germany  my  brother 
and  I  got  news  of  my  father's  death,  there  kept 
running  through  my  head  with  monotonous 
insistency  Kipling's  lines: 

"He  scarce  had  need  to  doff  his  pride. 
Or  slough  the  dress  of  earth. 
E'en  as  he  trod  that  day  to  God 
So  walked  he  from  his  birth. 

In  simpleness  and  gentleness  and  honor  and  clean 
mirth." 

That  was  my  father,  to  whose  comradeship 
and  guidance  so  many  of  us  look  forward  in 
the  Happy  Hunting-Grounds. 


II 

In  Quest  of  Sable  Antelope 


II 

IN  QUEST  OP  SABLE  ANTELOPE 

It  was  a  bright,  sunny  day  toward  the  end 
of  October,  and  I  was  walking  along  the  streets 
of  the  old  Portuguese  town  of  Mombasa  on  the 
east  coast  of  Equatorial  Africa.  Behind  me, 
in  ragged  formation,  marched  some  twenty- 
five  blacks,  all  but  four  of  them  with  loads 
on  their  heads;  the  four  were  my  personal 
"boys,"  two  gun-bearers,  a  cook,  and  a  tent- 
boy.  They  were  scattered  among  the  crowd, 
hurrying  up  those  that  tried  to  lag  behind 
for  a  last  farewell  to  the  wives  and  sweethearts 
who  were  following  along  on  either  side,  clad 
in  the  dark-blue  or  more  gaudily  colored  sheets 
that  served  them  for  clothes. 

At  length  our  heterogeneous  assembly 
reached  the  white  sands  of  the  harbor,  and 
amid  much  confusion  we  stowed  away  into  a 
couple  of  long,  broad  dugouts  and  were  ferried 
out  to  a  dhow  that  lay  moored  not  far  from  the 
shore.     We  set  sail  amid  the  shrill  cries  of  the 

63 


54    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

women  and  a  crowd  of  small  children  who,  on 
our  approach,  had  scurried  out  of  the  water 
like  so  many  black  monitor  lizards. 

We  steered  out  across  the  bay  toward  a 
headland  some  two  miles  distant.  There  was 
just  enough  breeze  to  ruffle  the  water,  but  the 
dhow  sped  along  at  a  rate  that  belied  appear- 
ances. Sprawling  among  their  loads  the  men 
lit  cigarettes  and  chatted  and  joked,  talking 
of  the  prospects  of  the  trip,  or  the  recent  gossip 
of  Mombasa.  The  sailors,  not  knowing  that 
I  understood  Swahili,  began  to  discuss  me 
in  loud  tones.  An  awkward  silence  fell  upon 
the  porters,  who  didn't  quite  know  how  to 
tell  them.  Mali,  my  tent-boy,  who  was 
sitting  near  me,  looked  toward  me  and  smiled. 
When  the  discussion  became  a  little  too  per- 
sonal, I  turned  to  him  and  made  a  few  perti- 
nent remarks  about  the  crew.  The  porters 
grinned  delightedly,  and  rarely  have  I  seen 
more  shamefaced  men  than  those  sailors. 

In  far  too  short  a  time  for  all  of  us  the  dhow 
grounded  on  the  other  side  and  we  jumped 
out  and  started  to  unload.  A  giant  baobab- 
tree  stood  near  the  beach;  a  cluster  of  huts 
beneath  it  were  occupied  by  some  Swahilis 
who  fished,  and  ran  a  small  store,  where  my 


IN  QUEST  OF  SABLE  ANTELOPE    55 

porters  laid  in  a  final  supply  of  delicacies — 
sugar  and  tobacco. 

It  is  customary  to  have  a  native  head  man, 
but  on  this  short  trip  I  had  decided  to  do  with- 
out one,  for  though  the  porters  were  new,  my 
personal  boys  were  old  friends.  Accordingly, 
when  all  the  loads  were  ready  and  neatly  ar- 
ranged in  line,  I  shouted  ''Bandika!"  Great 
muscular  black  arms  caught  the  packs  and 
swung  them  up  into  place  on  the  head,  and  off 
we  started,  along  the  old  coast  trail,  worn  deep 
with  the  traffic  of  centuries,  and  leading  on 
for  several  hundred  miles  with  native  villages 
strung  along  its  length.  Behind  me  strode 
my  two  gun  boys,  then  came  the  porters,  all 
in  single  file,  their  present  regular  order  a 
strong  contrast  with  our  disordered  progress 
through  the  streets  of  Mombasa.  Mali  and 
Kombo,  the  cook,  brought  up  the  rear  to  look 
out  for  stragglers,  and  help  unfortunates  to 
rearrange  their  loads  more  comfortably. 

A  little  way  from  the  shore  we  passed  an 
old  Arab  well;  some  women  were  drawing 
water  from  it,  but  at  our  approach  they  de- 
serted their  earthen  jars  and  hurried  away 
with  shrill  ejaculations.  Fresh  from  the  more 
arid  interior,  I  imagined  that  the  men  would 


56    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

fill  their  gourds,  but  they  filed  past  without 
stopping,  for  this  was  a  land  of  many  streams. 

We  continued  on  our  way  silently,  now 
through  stretches  of  sandy  land  covered  with 
stunted  bushes,  now  through  native  shambas, 
or  cultivated  fields,  until  we  came  upon  a 
group  of  natives  seated  under  a  gigantic  wide- 
spreading  tree.  It  was  a  roadside  shop,  and 
the  porters  threw  down  their  loads  and  shoul- 
dered their  way  to  where  the  shopkeeper  was 
squatting  behind  his  wares — nuts,  tobacco, 
tea,  bits  of  brass  wire,  beads,  and  sweet- 
meats of  a  somewhat  gruesome  appearance. 
He  was  a  striking-looking  old  fellow  with  a 
short  gray  beard.  Pretty  soon  he  came  to 
where  I  was  sitting  with  a  measure  of  nuts 
for  the  white  man;  so  in  return  I  took  out 
my  tobacco-pouch  and  presented  him  with 
some  of  the  white  man's  tobacco. 

After  a  few  minutes'  rest  we  set  out  again 
and  marched  along  for  some  time  until  we 
came  to  a  cocoanut-palm  grove,  where  I  de- 
cided to  camp  for  the  night.  The  natives  we 
were  among  were  called  the  WaNyika — the 
"children  of  the  wilderness." 

Leaving  the  men  to  arrange  camp  under 
the  supervision  of  the  gun-bearers,  I  strolled 


IN  QUEST  OF  SABLE  ANTELOPE    57 

over  to  a  near-by  village  where  there  was  a 
dance  in  full  swing.  The  men  were  regaling 
themselves  with  eocoanut-wine,  an  evil-tast- 
ing liquid,  made  from  fermented  cocoanut- 
mUk,  they  told  me.  The  moon,  almost  at 
full,  was  rising  when  I  returned  to  camp,  and 
after  supper  I  sat  and  smoked  and  watched 
"the  night  and  the  palms  in  the  moonUght," 
until  the  local  chief,  or  Sultani,  as  they  called 
him,  came  up  and  presented  me  with  some 
ripe  cocoanuts,  and  sitting  down  on  the  ground 
beside  me  he  puflFed  away  at  his  long  clay 
pipe,  coughing  and  choking  over  the  strong 
tobacco  I  had  given  him,  but  apparently  en- 
joying it  all  immensely.  When  he  left  I  re- 
mained alone,  unable  for  some  time  to  make 
up  my  mind  to  go  to  bed,  such  was  the  spell 
of  the  tropic  moonlight  and  the  distant  half- 
heard  songs  of  the  dancing  "children  of  the 
wilderness." 

Early  next  morning  we  were  on  our  way, 
and  that  night  were  camped  a  few  hundred 
yards  from  the  village  of  a  grizzled  old  Sultani, 
whose  domains  lay  in  the  heart  of  the  sable 
country,  for  it  was  in  search  of  these  handsome 
antelopes  that  I  had  come.  In  southern  Africa 
the  adult  males  of  the  species  are  almost  black. 


58    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

with  white  beUies,  but  here  they  were  not  so 
dark  in  color,  resembling  more  nearly  the 
southern  female  sable,  which  is  a  dark  red- 
dish brown.  Both  sexes  carry  long  horns  that 
sweep  back  in  a  graceful  curve  over  the  shoul- 
ders, those  of  the  male  much  heavier  and 
longer,  sometimes,  in  the  south,  attaining  five 
feet  in  length.  The  sable  antelope  is  a  savage 
animal,  and  when  provoked,  will  attack  man 
or  beast.  The  rapier-like  horns  prove  an  effec- 
tive weapon  as  many  a  dog  has  learned  to  its 
cost. 

My  tent  was  pitched  beneath  one  of  the  large 
shade-trees  in  which  the  country  abounds. 
This  one  was  the  village  council-tree,  and  when 
I  arrived  the  old  men  were  seated  beneath  it 
on  little  wooden  stools.  These  were  each 
hacked  out  of  a  single  log  and  were  only  five 
or  six  inches  high.  The  owner  carried  his 
stool  with  him  wherever  he  went,  slinging  it 
over  his  shoulder  on  a  bit  of  rawhide  or  a 
chain. 

There  was  trouble  in  the  village,  for  after 
the  first  formal  greetings  were  over  the  old 
chief  told  me  that  one  of  his  sons  had  just 
died.  There  was  about  to  be  held  a  dance  in 
his  memory,  and  he  led  me  over  to  watch  it. 


IN  QUEST  OF  SABLE  ANTELOPE    59 

We  arrived  just  as  the  ceremony  was  starting. 
Only  small  boys  were  taking  part  in  it,  and  it 
was  anything  but  a  mournful  affair,  for  each 
boy  had  strung  round  his  ankles  baskets  filled 
with  pebbles  that  rattled  in  time  with  the 
rhythm  of  the  dance.  In  piping  soprano  they 
sang  a  lively  air  which,  unlike  any  native 
music  I  had  hitherto  heard,  sounded  distinctly 
Eiu'opean,  and  would  scarcely  have  been 
out  of  place  in  a  comic  opera. 

When  the  dance  was  finished  the  Sultani 
came  back  with  me  to  my  tent,  and  sitting 
down  on  his  stool  beside  me,  we  gossiped  until 
I  was  ready  to  go  to  bed.  I  had  given  him  a 
gorgeous  green  umbrella  and  a  most  meritorious 
knife,  promising  him  further  presents  should 
success  attend  me  in  the  chase.  He,  in  addi- 
tion to  the  customary  cocoanuts,  had  pre- 
sented me  with  some  chickens  and  a  large 
supply  of  a  carrot-shaped  root  called  mihogo; 
by  no  means  a  bad  substitute  for  potatoes, 
and  eaten  either  raw  or  cooked;  having  in 
the  former  state  a  slight  chestnut  flavor. 

The  first  day's  hunting  was  a  blank,  for  al- 
though we  climbed  hill  after  hill  and  searched 
the  country  with  my  spy-glasses,  we  saw  noth- 
ing but  some  kongoni  (hartebeeste) ,  and  I  had 


60    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

no  intention  of  risking  disturbing  the  country 
by  shooting  at  them,  much  as  the  men  would 
have  Kked  the  meat.  It  was  the  rainy  sea- 
son, and  we  were  continually  getting  drenched 
by  showers,  but  between  times  the  sun  would 
appear  and  in  an  incredibly  short  time  we 
would  be  dry  again.  The  Sultani  had  given 
me  two  guides,  sturdy,  cheerful  fellows  with 
no  idea  of  hunting,  but  knowing  the  country 
well,  which  was  all  we  wanted.  We  loaded 
them  down  with  cocoanuts,  for  in  the  middle 
of  the  day  when  one  was  feeling  tired  and  hot 
it  was  most  refreshing  to  cut  a  hole  in  a  cocoa- 
nut  and  drink  the  milk,  eating  the  meat  after- 
ward. 

The  following  day  we  made  a  very  early 
start,  leaving  camp  amid  a  veritable  tropical 
downpour.  For  half  an  hour  we  threaded 
our  way  through  the  semi-cultivated  native 
shambas;  the  rain  soon  stopped,  the  sun  rose, 
and  we  followed  an  overgrown  trail  through  a 
jungle  of  glistening  leaves.  Climbing  a  large 
hill,  we  sat  down  among  some  rocks  to  recon- 
noitre. Just  as  I  was  lighting  my  pipe  I 
saw  Juma  Yohari,  one  of  my  gun-bearers, 
motioning  excitedly.  I  crept  over  to  him 
and  he  pointed  out,  three-quarters  of  a  mile 


IN  QUEST  OF  SABLE  ANTELOPE    61 

away,  a  small  band  of  sable  crossing  a  little 
open  space  between  two  thickets.  The  coun- 
try was  diflScult  to  hunt,  for  it  was  so  furrowed 
with  valleys,  down  the  most  of  which  there  ran 
streams,  that  there  was  very  little  level  land, 
and  that  little  was  in  the  main  bush  country — 
the  Bara,  as  the  natives  called  it.  There  were, 
however,  occasional  open  stretches,  but  dur- 
ing the  rainy  season,  as  at  present,  the  grass 
was  so  high  everywhere  that  it  was  difficult 
to  find  game.  We  held  a  hurried  consultation, 
Juma,  Kasitura — ^my  other  gun-bearer — and 
myself;  after  a  short  disagreement  we  decided 
upon  the  course,  and  set  out  as  fast  as  we 
safely  could  toward  the  point  agreed  on.  It 
was  exhausting  work:  through  ravines,  up 
hills,  all  amid  a  tangle  of  vines  and  thorns; 
and  once  among  the  valleys  it  was  hard  to 
know  just  where  we  were.  When  we  reached 
what  we  felt  was  the  spot  we  had  aimed  at,  we 
could  find  no  trace  of  our  quarry,  though  we 
searched  stealthily  in  all  directions.  I  led 
the  way  toward  a  cluster  of  tall  palms  that 
were  surrounded  by  dense  undergrowth.  A 
slight  wind  rose,  and  as  I  entered  the  thicket 
with  every  nerve  tense,  I  heard  a  loud  and  most 
disconcerting  crackle  that  caused  me  to  jump 


62    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

back  on  to  Yohari,  who  was  close  behind  me. 
He  grinned  and  pointed  to  some  great  dead 
palm-leaves  pendant  along  the  trunk  of  one 
of  the  trees  that  the  wind  had  set  in  motion. 
The  next  instant  I  caught  sight  of  a  pair  of 
horns  moving  through  the  brush.  On  making 
out  the  general  outline  of  the  body,  I  fired. 
Another  antelope  that  I  had  not  seen  made  off, 
and  taking  it  for  a  female  I  again  fired,  bring- 
ing it  down  with  a  most  lucky  shot.  I  had 
hoped  to  collect  male,  female,  and  young  for 
the  museum,  so  I  was  overjoyed,  believing  that 
I  had  on  the  second  day's  hunting  managed  to 
get  the  two  adults.  Yohari  and  Kasitura 
thought  the  same,  but  when  we  reached  our 
quarry  we  found  them  to  be  both  males;  the 
latter  a  yoimg  one,  and  the  former,  although 
full  grown  in  body,  by  no  means  the  tawny 
black  color  of  an  old  bull.  We  set  to  work  on 
the  skins,  and  soon  had  them  off.  Juma  took 
one  of  the  Shenzies*  and  went  back  to  camp 
with  the  skins,  while  Kasitura  and  I  went  on 
with  the  other.  We  returned  to  camp  by 
moonlight  that  night  without  having  seen 
any  more  game.    The  porters  had  gone  out 

*  Shenzi  really  means  bushman,  but  it  is  applied,  generally  in  a  de- 
rogatory sense,  by  the  Swabilis  to  all  the  wild  natives,  or  "  blanket 
Indians." 


IN  QUEST  OF  SABLE  ANTELOPE    63 

and  brought  in  the  meat  and  there  was  a  grand 
feast  in  progress. 

After  some  antelope-steak  and  a  couple  of 
cups  of  tea  I  tumbled  into  bed  and  was  soon 
sound  asleep.  The  next  thing  I  knew  I  was 
wide  awake,  feeling  as  if  there  were  fourscore 
pincers  at  work  on  me.  Bounding  out  of 
bed,  I  ran  for  the  camp-fire,  which  was  still 
flickering.  I  was  covered  with  ants.  They 
had  apparently  attacked  the  boys  sleeping 
near  me  at  about  the  same  time,  for  the  camp 
was  in  an  uproar  and  there  was  a  hurrying  of 
black  figiKes,  and  a  torrent  of  angry  Swahili 
imprecations.  There  was  nothing  for  it  but 
to  beat  an  ignominious  retreat,  and  we  fled 
in  confusion.  Once  out  of  reach  of  reinforce- 
ments we  soon  ridded  ourselves  of  such  of  our 
adversaries  as  were  still  on  us.  Fortunately 
for  us  the  assault  had  taken  place  not  long  be- 
fore dawn,  and  we  returned  to  camp  safely  by 
daylight. 

That  day  we  moved  camp  to  the  top  of  a 
neighboring  hill,  about  a  mile  from  the  vil- 
lage. I  spent  the  morning  working  over  the 
skins  which  I  had  only  roughly  salted  the  night 
before;  but  in  the  afternoon  we  sallied  forth 
again  to  the  hunt. 


64    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

We  went  through  several  unsuccessful  days 
before  I  again  came  up  with  sable.  Several 
times  we  had  met  with  fresh  tracks,  and  in 
each  case  Kasitura,  who  was  a  strapping  Basoga 
from  a  tribe  far  inland  and  an  excellent  tracker, 
took  up  the  trail  and  did  admirable  work. 
The  country  was  invariably  so  dense  and  the 
game  so  wary  that  in  spite  of  Kasitura's  re- 
markable tracking,  only  on  two  occasions  did 
we  sight  the  quarry,  and  each  time  it  was  only 
a  fleeting  glimpse  as  they  crashed  ofiF.  I  could 
have  had  a  shot,  but  I  was  anxious  not  to  kill 
anything  more  save  a  full-grown  female  or  an 
old  master  bull;  and  it  was  impossible  to  de- 
termine either  sex  or  age. 

On  what  was  to  be  our  last  day's  hunting 
we  made  a  particularly  early  start  and  pushed 
on  and  on  through  the  wild  bushland,  stopping 
occasionally  to  spy  round  from  some  vantage- 
point.  We  would  swelter  up  a  hill,  down  into 
the  next  valley  among  the  lovely  tall  trees 
that  lined  the  brook,  cross  the  cool,  rock- 
strewn  stream,  and  on  again.  The  sable  fed 
in  the  open  only  in  the  very  early  morning 
till  about  nine  o'clock,  then  they  would  retreat 
into  the  thickets  and  doze  until  four  or  five 
in  the  afternoon,  when  they  would  again  come 


IN  QUEST  OF  SABLE  ANTELOPE    65 

out  to  feed.  During  the  intervening  time  our 
only  chance  was  to  run  across  them  by  luck, 
or  find  fresh  tracks  to  follow.  On  that  par- 
ticular day  we  climbed  a  high  hill  about  noon  to 
take  a  look  round  and  have  a  couple  of  hours' 
siesta.  I  found  a  shady  tree  and  sat  down  with 
my  back  against  the  trunk.  Ten  miles  or  so 
away  sparkled  and  shimmered  the  Indian 
Ocean.  On  all  sides  stretched  the  wonderful 
bushland,  here  and  there  in  the  distance 
broken  by  little  patches  of  half-cultivated 
land.  There  had  been  a  rain-storm  in  the 
morning,  but  now  the  sun  was  shining 
undimmed.  Taking  from  my  hunting-coat 
pocket  Borrow's  Wild  Wales,  I  was  soon  climb- 
ing far-distant  Snowdon  with  Lavengro,  and 
was  only  brought  back  to  realities  by  Juma, 
who  came  up  to  discuss  the  afternoon's  cam- 
paign. We  had  scarcely  begun  when  one  of 
the  Shenzies,  whom  I  had  sent  to  watch  from  a 
neighboring  hill,  came  up  in  great  excitement 
to  say  that  he  had  found  a  large  sable  bull. 
We  hurried  along  after  him,  and  presently  he 
pointed  to  a  thicket  ahead  of  us.  Leaving 
the  rest  behind,  Juma  and  I  proceeded  cau- 
tiously toward  the  thicket.  We  found  two 
sable  cows,  which  Juma  felt  sure  were  all 


66    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

that  there  were  in  the  thicket,  whereas  I  could 
not  help  putting  some  faith  in  the  Shenzi 
who  had  been  very  insistent  about  the  "big 
bull."  I  was  convinced  at  length  that  Juma 
was  right,  so  I  took  aim  at  the  better  of  the 
cows.  My  shooting  was  poor,  for  I  only 
crippled  her,  and  when  I  moved  up  close  for  a 
final  shot  she  attempted  to  charge,  snorting 
savagely,  but  too  badly  hit  to  cause  any 
trouble. 

We  had  spent  some  time  searching  for  the 
bull,  so  that  by  the  time  we  had  the  skin  off, 
the  brief  African  twilight  was  upon  us.  We 
had  been  hunting  very  hard  for  the  last  week, 
and  were  all  of  us  somewhat  fagged,  but  as  we 
started  toward  camp  I  soon  forgot  my  weari- 
ness in  the  magic  of  the  night.  Before  the 
moon  rose  we  trooped  silently  along,  no  one 
speaking,  but  all  listening  to  the  strange 
noises  of  the  wilderness.  We  were  following  a 
rambling  native  trail,  which  wound  along  a 
deep  valley  beside  a  stream  for  some  time 
before  it  struck  out  across  the  hills  for  camp. 
There  was  but  little  game  in  the  country,  still 
occasionally  we  would  hear  a  buck  that  had 
winded  us  crashing  ofiF,  or  some  animal  splash- 
ing across  the   stream.    In  the   more   open 


IN  QUEST  OF  SABLE  ANTELOPE    67 

country  the  noise  of  the  cicadas,  loud  and 
incessant,  took  me  back  to  the  sound  of  the 
katydids  in  summer  nights  on  Long  Island. 
The  moon  rose  large  and  round,  outlining  the 
tall  ivory-nut  palms.  It  was  as  if  we  were 
marching  in  fairyland,  and  with  real  regret  I 
at  length  caught  the  gleam  of  the  camp-fire 
through  the  trees. 

It  was  after  ten  o'clock,  when  we  had  had 
something  to  eat,  but  Juma,  Kasitura,  and  I 
gathered  to  work  on  the  sable,  and  toiled  until 
we  began  to  nod  off  to  sleep  as  we  skinned. 

Next  morning  I  paid  my  last  visit  to  the  old 
Sultani,  rewarding  him  as  I  had  promised  and 
solemnly  agreeing  to  come  back  and  live  with 
him  in  his  country.  The  porters  were  joyful, 
as  is  always  the  case  when  they  are  headed 
for  Mombasa.  Each  thought  of  the  joyous 
time  he  would  have  spending  his  earnings, 
and  they  sang  in  unison  as  they  swung  along 
the  trail — careless,  happy  children.  I,  too, 
was  in  the  best  of  spirits,  for  my  quest  had  been 
successful,  and  I  was  not  returning  empty- 
handed. 


Ill 

The  Sheep  of  the  Desert 


Ill 

THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT 

I  wished  to  hunt  the  mountain-sheep  of  the 
Mexican  desert,  hoping  to  be  able  to  get  a 
series  needed  by  the  National  Museum. 

At  Yuma,  on  the  Colorado  River,  in  the 
extreme  southwestern  corner  of  Arizona,  I 
gathered  my  outfit.  Doctor  Carl  Lumholtz, 
the  explorer,  had  recently  been  travelling  and 
hunting  in  that  part  of  Mexico.  In  addition 
to  much  valuable  help  as  to  outfitting,  he  told 
me  how  to  get  hold  of  a  Mexican  who  had 
been  with  him  and  whom  he  had  found  trust- 
worthy. The  postmaster,  Mr.  Chandler,  and 
Mr.  Verdugo,  a  prominent  business  man,  had 
both  been  more  than  kind  in  helping  in  every 
possible  way.  Mr.  Charles  Utting,  clerk  of 
the  District  Court,  sometime  Rough  Rider, 
and  inveterate  prospector,  was  to  start  oflF  with 
me  for  a  short  holiday  from  judicial  duties. 
To  him  the  desert  was  an  open  book,  and  from 
long  experience  he  understood  all  the  methods 
and  needs  of  desert  travel.     Mr.  Win  Proeb- 

71 


72    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

stel,  ranchman  and  prospector,  was  also  to 
start  with  us.  He  had  shot  mountain-sheep 
all  the  way  from  Alaska  to  Mexico,  and  was 
a  mine  of  first-hand  information  as  to  their 
habits  and  seasons.  I  had  engaged  two 
Mexicans,  Cipriano  Dominguez  and  Eustacio 
Casares. 

On  the  afternoon  of  the  10th  of  August  we 
reached  Wellton,  a  little  station  on  the  South- 
ern Pacific,  some  forty  miles  east  of  Yuma. 
Win  and  his  brother,  Ike  Proebstel,  were  ready 
with  a  wagon,  which  the  latter  was  to  drive 
to  a  water-hole  some  sixteen  miles  south,  near 
some  mining  claims  of  Win's.  August  is  the 
hottest  month  in  the  year  in  that  country,  a 
time  when  on  the  desert  plains  of  Sonora  the 
thermometer  marks  140  degrees;  so  we  decided 
to  take  advantage  of  a  glorious  full  moon  and 
make  our  first  march  by  night.  We  loaded  as 
much  as  we  could  of  our  outfit  into  the  wagon, 
so  as  to  save  our  riding  and  pack  animals.  We 
started  at  nine  in  the  evening.  The  moon  rode 
high.  At  first  the  desfert  stretched  in  unbroken 
monotony  on  all  sides,  to  the  dim  and  far-oflP 
mountains.  In  a  couple  of  hours  we  came  to 
the  country  of  the  saguaro,  the  giant  cactus. 
All  aroimd  us,  their  shafts  forty  or  fifty  feet 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     73 

high,  with  occasional  branches  set  at  grotesque 
angles  to  the  trunk,  they  rose  from  the  level 
floor  of  the  desert,  ghostly  in  the  moonlight. 
The  air  seemed  cool  in  comparison  with  the 
heat  of  the  day,  though  the  ground  was  still 
warm  to  the  touch. 

Shortly  before  one  in  the  morning  we  reached 
Win's  water-hole — tank,  in  the  parlance  of 
the  country — and  were  soon  stretched  out  on 
our  blankets,  fast  asleep. 

Next  day  we  loaded  our  outfit  on  our  two 
pack-mules  and  struck  out  across  the  desert 
for  the  Tinajas  Altas  (High  Tanks),  which 
lay  on  the  slopes  of  a  distant  range  of  moun- 
tains, about  four  miles  from  the  Mexican 
border.  For  generations  these  tanks  have 
been  a  well-known  stepping-stone  in  crossing 
the  desert.  There  are  a  series  of  them,  worn 
out  in  the  solid  rock  and  extending  up  a  cleft 
in  the  mountainside,  which,  in  time  of  rain, 
becomes  the  course  of  a  torrent.  The  usual 
camping-place  is  a  small  plateau,  a  couple  of 
hundred  yards  from  the  lowest  tank.  This 
plateau  lies  in  a  gulch  and  is  sheltered  on  either 
hand  by  its  steep  and  barren  sides.  A  few 
hundred  feet  from  the  entrance,  on  the  desert 
and   scattered   about   among   the   cactus,   lie 


74    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

some  hundred  and  fifty  graves — the  graves  of 
men  who  have  died  of  thirst;  for  this  is  a  grim 
land,  and  death  dogs  the  footsteps  of  those 
who  cross  it.  Most  of  the  dead  men  were 
Mexicans  who  had  struggled  across  the  deserts 
only  to  find  the  tanks  dry.  Each  lay  where  he 
fell,  until,  sooner  or  later,  some  other  traveller 
found  him  and  scooped  out  for  him  a  shallow 
grave,  and  on  it  laid  a  pile  of  rocks  in  the 
shape  of  a  rude  cross.  Forty-six  unfortunates 
perished  here  at  one  time  of  thirst.  They 
were  making  their  way  across  the  deserts  to 
the  United  States,  and  were  in  the  last  stages 
of  exhaustion  for  lack  of  water  when  they 
reached  these  tanks.  But  a  Mexican  outlaw 
named  Blanco  reached  the  tanks  ahead  of 
them  and  bailed  out  the  water,  after  carefully 
laying  in  a  store  for  himself  not  far  away.  By 
this  cache  he  waited  until  he  felt  sure  that  his 
victims  were  dead;  he  then  returned  to  the 
tanks,  gathered  the  possessions  of  the  dead, 
and  safely  made  his  escape. 

A  couple  of  months  previously  a  band  of 
insurrectos  had  been  camped  by  these  tanks, 
and  two  newly  made  graves  marked  their 
contribution.  The  men  had  been  killed  in 
a  brawl. 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     75 

Utting  told  us  of  an  adventure  that  took 
place  here,  a  few  years  ago,  which  very  nearly 
had  a  tragic  termination.  It  was  in  the 
winter  season  and  there  was  an  American 
camped  at  the  tanks,  when  two  Mexicans 
came  there  on  their  way  to  the  Tule  tanks, 
twenty-five  miles  away,  near  which  they  in- 
tended to  do  some  prospecting.  Forty-eight 
hours  after  they  had  left,  one  of  them  turned 
up  riding  their  pack-mule  and  in  a  bad  way 
for  water.  He  said  that  they  had  found  the 
Tule  tanks  dry,  but  had  resolved  to  have 
one  day's  prospecting  anyway;  they  had 
separated,  but  agreed  at  what  time  they 
were  to  meet.  Although  he  waited  for  a  long 
while  after  the  agreed  time,  his  companion 
never  appeared,  and  he  was  forced  to  start 
back  alone. 

Twenty-four  hours  after  the  return  of  this 
Mexican,  the  American  was  awakened  in  the 
night  by  hearing  strange  sounds  in  the  bed 
of  the  arroyo.  When  he  went  down  to  in- 
vestigate them  he  found  the  lost  Mexican;  he 
was  in  a  fearful  condition,  totally  out  of  his 
head,  and  was  vainly  struggling  to  crawl  up 
the  bank  of  the  arroyo,  in  order  to  make  the 
last  hundred  yards  across  the  plateau  to  the 


76    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

water-hole.  He  would  never  have  reached  it 
alone.  By  careful  treatment  the  American 
brought  him  round  and  then  listened  to  his 
story.  He  had  lost  himself  when  he  went  oflf 
prospecting,  and  when  he  finally  got  his  bear- 
ings he  was  already  in  a  very  bad  way  for 
water.  Those  dwelling  in  cool,  well-watered 
regions  can  hardly  make  themselves  realize 
what  thirst  means  in  that  burning  desert. 
He  knew  that  although  there  was  no  water  in 
the  Tule  wells,  there  was  some  damp  mud  in 
the  bottom,  and  he  said  that  all  he  wished  to 
do  was  to  reach  the  wells  and  cool  himself  oflF 
in  the  mud  before  he  died.  A  short  distance 
from  the  tanks  the  trail  he  was  following  di- 
vided, one  branch  leading  to  the  Tule  wells 
and  the  other  back  to  the  Tinajas  Altas,  twenty- 
five  miles  away.  The  Mexican  was  so  crazed 
that  he  took  the  wrong  branch,  and  before  he 
realized  his  mistake  he  had  gone  some  way  past 
Tule;  he  then  decided  that  it  was  the  hand  of 
providence  that  had  led  him  past,  and  that  he 
must  try  to  make  Tinajas  Altas;  a  feat  which 
he  would  have  just  missed  accomplishing  but 
for  the  American  encamped  there. 

The  morning  after  we  reached  the  tanks, 
the  Tinah'alta,  as  they  are  called  colloquially. 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT    77 

Win  and  I  were  up  and  off  for  the  hunting- 
grounds  by  half  past  three;  by  sun-up  we 
were  across  the  border,  and  hunted  along  the 
foot  of  the  mountains,  climbing  across  the  out- 
jutting  ridges.  At  about  nine  we  reached  the 
top  of  a  ridge  and  began  looking  around. 
Win  called  to  me  that  he  saw  some  sheep. 
We  didn't  manage  things  very  skilfully,  and 
the  sheep  took  fright,  but  as  they  stopped  I 
shot  at  a  fine  ram,  Win's  rifle  echoing  my  shot. 
We  neither  of  us  scored  a  hit,  and  missed 
several  running  shots.  This  missing  was  mere 
bad  luck  on  Win's  part,  for  he  was  a  crack  shot, 
and  later  on  that  day,  when  we  were  not  to- 
gether, he  shot  a  ram,  only  part  of  which  was 
visible,  at  a  distance  of  three  himdred  and 
fifty  yards.  As  the  sun  grew  hotter  we  hunted 
farther  up  on  the  mountains,  but  we  saw  no 
more  sheep,  and  returned  to  camp  with  Utting, 
who  met  us  at  a  ravine  near  the  border. 

After  we  got  back  to  camp.  Win  and  I 
filled  some  canteens,  threw  our  blankets  on 
one  of  the  pack-mules,  took  Dominguez,  and 
rode  back  over  the  border  to  camp  in  the  dry 
bed  of  an  arroyo  near  where  we  had  been  hunt- 
ing in  the  morning.  We  sent  back  the  ani- 
mals, arranging  with  Dominguez  to  return  with 


78    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

them  the  following  day.  Next  morning  at  a 
little  after  three  we  rolled  out  of  our  blankets, 
built  a  little  fire  of  mesquite  wood,  and  after 
a  steaming  cup  of  coffee  and  some  cold  frying- 
pan  bread  we  shouldered  our  rifles  and  set 
out.  At  the  end  of  several  hours'  steady  walk- 
ing I  got  a  chance  at  a  fair  ram  and  missed. 
I  sat  down  and  took  out  my  field-glasses  to 
try  to  see  where  he  went;  and  I  soon  picked 
up  three  sheep  standing  on  a  great  boulder, 
near  the  foot  of  a  mountain  of  the  same  range 
that  we  were  on.  They  were  watching  us 
and  were  all  ewes,  but  I  wanted  one  for  the 
museum.  So  I  waited  till  they  lost  interest 
in  us,  got  down  from  the  rock,  and  disappeared 
from  our  sight.  I  then  left  Win  and  started 
toward  the  boulder;  after  some  rather  careful 
stalking  I  got  one  of  them  at  about  two  hun- 
dred yards  by  some  fairly  creditable  shooting. 
The  side  of  the  mountain  range  along  which 
we  were  hunting  was  cut  by  numerous  deep 
gullies  from  two  to  three  hundred  yards  across. 
After  I  had  dressed  the  ewe  I  thought  I  would 
go  a  little  way  farther,  on  the  chance  of  com- 
ing upon  the  ram  I  had  missed;  for  he  had 
disappeared  in  that  direction.  When  I  had 
crossed  three  or  four  ridges  I  sat  down  to  look 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     79 

around.  It  was  about  half  past  nine,  the  heat 
was  burning,  and  I  knew  the  sheep  would  soon 
be  going  up  the  mountains  to  seek  the  shelter 
of  the  eaves  in  which  they  spend  the  noonday 
hours.  Suddenly  I  realized  that  there  were 
some  sheep  on  the  side  of  the  next  ridge  stand- 
ing quietly  watching  me.  There  were  four 
bunches,  scattered  among  the  rocks;  three 
were  of  ewes  and  young,  and  there  was  one 
bunch  of  rams;  in  all  there  were  sixteen  sheep. 
I  picked  out  the  best  ram,  and,  estimating 
the  distance  at  two  hundred  and  fifty  yards, 
I  fired,  hitting,  but  too  low.  I  failed  to  score 
in  the  running  shooting,  but  when  he  was  out 
of  sight  I  hurried  over  and  picked  up  the  trail; 
he  was  bleeding  freely,  and  it  was  not  difficult 
to  follow  him.  He  went  half  a  mile  or  so  and 
then  lay  down  in  a  rock  cave;  but  he  was  up 
and  off  before  I  could  labor  into  sight,  and 
made  a  most  surprising  descent  down  the 
side  of  a  steep  ravine.  When  I  caught  sight 
of  him  again  he  was  half-way  up  the  opposite 
wall  of  the  ravine  though  only  about  a  hundred 
yards  distant;  he  was  standing  behind  a 
large  rock  with  only  his  quarters  visible,  but 
one  more  shot  brought  matters  to  a  finish. 
The  heat  was  very  great,  so  I  started  right  to 


80    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

work  to  get  the  skin  oflF.  A  great  swarm  of 
bees  gathered  to  the  feast.  They  were  villain- 
ous-looking, and  at  first  they  gave  me  many 
qualms,  but  we  got  used  to  each  other  and  I 
soon  paid  no  attention  to  them,  merely  brush- 
ing them  off  any  part  that  I  wanted  to  skin. 
I  was  only  once  stung,  and  that  was  when  a 
bee  got  inside  my  clothing  and  I  inadvertently 
squeezed  it.  Before  I  had  finished  the  skin- 
ning I  heard  a  shot  from  Win;  I  replied,  and 
a  little  while  afterward  he  came  along.  I  shall 
not  soon  forget  packing  the  skin,  with  the 
head  and  the  leg-bones  still  in  it,  down  that 
mountainside.  In  addition  to  being  very 
heavy,  it  made  an  unwieldy  bundle,  as  I  had 
no  rope  with  which  to  tie  it  up.  I  held  the 
head  balanced  on  one  shoulder,  with  a  horn 
hooked  round  my  neck;  the  legs  I  bunched 
together  as  best  I  could,  but  they  were  con- 
tinually coming  loose  and  causing  endless  trou- 
ble. After  I  reached  the  bottom,  I  left  Win 
with  the  sheep  and  struck  off  for  our  night's 
camping-place.  It  was  after  eleven  and  the 
very  hottest  part  of  the  day.  I  had  to  be 
careful  not  to  touch  any  of  the  metal  part  of 
my  gun;  indeed,  the  wooden  stock  was  un- 
pleasantly hot,  and  I  was  exceedingly  glad  that 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT    81 

there  was  to  be  water  waiting  for  me  at 
camp. 

I  got  Dominguez  and  the  horses  and  brought 
in  the  sheep,  which  took  several  hours.  That 
afternoon  we  were  back  at  Tinah'alta,  with  a 
long  evening's  work  ahead  of  me  skinning  out 
the  heads  and  feet  by  starlight.  Utting,  who 
was  always  ready  to  do  anything  at  any  time, 
and  did  everything  well,  turned  to  with  a  will 
and  took  the  ewe  oflF  my  hands. 

The  next  day  I  was  hard  at  work  on  the 
skins.  One  of  the  tanks,  about  four  hundred 
yards  from  camp,  was  a  great  favorite  with  the 
sheep,  and  more  than  once  during  our  stay  the 
men  in  camp  saw  sheep  coine  down  to  drink 
at  it.  This  had  generally  happened  when  I 
was  oflF  hunting;  but  on  the  morning  when  I 
was  busy  with  the  skins  two  rams  came  down 
to  drink.  It  was  an  hour  before  noon;  for 
at  this  place  the  sheep  finished  feeding  before 
they  drank.  The  wind  was  blowing  directly  up 
the  gulch  to  them,  but  although  they  stopped 
several  times  to  stare  at  the  camp,  they  even- 
tually came  to  the  water-hole  and  drank. 
Of  course  we  didn't  disturb  these  sheep,  for 
not  only  were  they  in  the  United  States,  but 
they  were  drinking  at  a  water-hole  in  a  desert 


82    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

country;  and  a  man  who  has  travelled  the 
deserts,  and  is  any  sort  of  a  sportsman,  would 
not  shoot  game  at  a  water-hole  unless  he  were 
in  straits  for  food. 

I  had  been  hunting  on  the  extreme  end  of 
the  Gila  Range  and  near  a  range  called  EI 
Viejo  Hombre  (The  Old  Man).  After  I  shot 
my  ram,  in  the  confusion  that  followed,  two 
of  the  young  rams  broke  back,  came  down  the 
mountain,  passing  quite  close  to  Win,  and 
crossed  the  plain  to  the  Viejo  Hombre  Range, 
some  mile  and  a  half  away.  The  bands  of 
sheep  out  of  which  I  shot  my  specimens  had 
been  feeding  chiefly  on  the  twigs  of  a  small 
symmetrical  bush,  called  by  the  Mexicans  El 
Yervo  del  Baso,  the  same,  I  believe,  that  Pro- 
fessor Hornaday  in  his  Camp-Fires  on  Desert 
and  Lava  calls  the  white  Brittle  bush.  They 
had  also  been  eating  such  galleta-grass  as 
they  could  find;  it  was  on  this  grass  that  we 
depended  for  food  for  our  horses  and  mules. 
Apparently  the  sheep  of  these  bands  had  not 
been  going  to  the  water-hole;  there  were  nu- 
merous places  where  they  had  been  breaking 
down  cactus  and  eating  the  pulp.  In  this 
country  Win  said  that  the  rams  and  the  ewes 
began  to  run  together  in  October,  and  that  in 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     83 

February  the  young  were  born.  When  the 
rams  left  the  ewes,  they  took  with  them  the 
yeariing  rams,  and  they  didn't  join  the  ewes 
again  until  the  next  October. 

On  the  following  day  I  left  Utting  and  Proeb- 
stel  and  took  the  trail  to  the  Tule  tank.  The 
two  Mexicans  were  with  me  and  we  had  two 
horses  and  three  mules.  We  were  travelling 
very  light,  for  we  were  bound  for  a  country 
where  water-holes  were  not  only  few  and  far 
between  but  most  uncertain.  My  personal 
baggage  consisted  of  my  washing  kit,  an  extra 
pair  of  shoes,  a  change  of  socks,  and  a  couple 
of  books.  Besides  our  bedding  we  had  some 
coffee,  tea,  sugar,  rice,  flour  (with  a  little  bacon 
to  take  the  place  of  lard  in  making  bread),  and 
a  good  supply  of  frijoles,  or  Mexican  beans. 
It  was  on  these  last  that  we  really  lived.  As 
soon  as  we  got  to  a  camp  we  always  put  some 
frijoles  in  a  kettle  and  started  a  little  fire  to 
boil  them.  If  we  were  to  be  there  for  a  couple 
of  days  we  put  in  enough  beans  to  last  us  the 
whole  time,  and  then  all  that  was  necessary  in 
getting  a  meal  ready  was  to  warm  up  the  beans. 

It  was  between  four  and  five  in  the  after- 
noon when  we  left  Tinah'alta,  and  though 
the  moon  did  not  rise  until  late,  the  stars 


84    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

were  bright  and  the  trail  was  clear.  The 
desert  we  were  riding  through  was  covered 
with  mesquite  and  creosote  and  innumerable 
choya  cactus;  there  were  also  two  kinds  of 
prickly-pear  cactus,  and  ocatillas  were  plenti- 
ful. The  last  are  curious  plants;  they  are 
formed  somewhat  on  the  principle  of  an  um- 
brella, with  a  very  short  central  stem  from 
which  sometimes  as  many  as  twenty  spokes 
radiate  umbrella-wise.  These  spokes  are  gen- 
erally about  six  feet  long  and  are  covered  with 
thorns  which  are  partially  concealed  by  tiny 
leaves.  The  flower  of  the  ocatilla  is  scarlet, 
and  although  most  of  them  had  stopped  flower- 
ing by  August,  there  were  a  few  still  in  bloom. 
After  about  six  hours'  silent  riding  we  reached 
Tule.  The  word  means  a  marsh,  but,  needless 
to  say,  all  that  we  found  was  a  rock-basin 
with  a  fair  supply  of  water  and  a  very  generous 
supply  of  tadpoles  and  water-lice. 

Next  morning  when  we  came  to  get  break- 
fast ready  we  found  we  had  lost,  through  a 
hole  in  a  pack-sack,  all  of  our  eating  utensils 
except  a  knife  and  two  spoons;  but  we  were 
thankful  at  having  got  off  so  easily.  By  three 
in  the  afternoon  we  were  ready  for  what  was 
to  be  our  hardest  march.     We  wished  to  get 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT    85 

into  the  Pinacate  country;  and  our  next  water 
was  to  be  the  Papago  tank,  which  Casares 
said  was  about  forty-five  miles  south  of  us. 
He  said  that  in  this  tank  we  were  always  sure 
to  find  water. 

For  the  first  fifteen  miles  our  route  lay  over 
the  Camino  del  Diablo,  a  trail  running  through 
the  Tule  desert — and  it  has  proved  indeed  a 
"road  of  the  devil"  for  many  an  unfortunate. 
Then  we  left  the  trail,  the  sun  sank,  twilight 
passed,  and  in  spite  of  the  brilliancy  of  the 
stars,  the  going  became  difficult.  In  many 
places  where  the  ground  was  free  from  boulders 
the  kangaroo-rats  had  made  a  network  of 
tunnels,  and  into  these  our  animals  fell,  often 
sinking  shoulder-deep.  Casares  was  leading, 
riding  a  hardy  little  white  mule.  While  he 
rode  he  rolled  cigarette  after  cigarette,  and  as 
he  bent  forward  in  his  saddle  to  light  them, 
for  a  moment  his  face  would  be  brought  into 
relief  by  the  burning  match  and  a  trail  of  sparks 
would  light  up  the  succeeding  darkness.  Once 
his  mule  shied  violently,  and  we  heard  the  angry 
rattling  of  a  side-winder,  a  sound  which  once 
heard  is  never  forgotten. 

At  about  eight  o'clock,  what  with  rocks  and 
kangaroo-rat  burrows,  the  going  became  so 


86    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

bad  that  we  decided  to  offsaddle  and  wait 
till  the  moon  should  rise.  We  stretched  out 
with  our  heads  on  our  saddles  and  dozed  until 
about  midnight,  when  it  was  time  to  start  on 
again.  Soon  the  desert  changed  and  we  were 
free  of  the  hills  among  which  we  had  been 
travelling,  and  were  riding  over  endless  rolling 
dunes  of  white  sand.  As  dawn  broke,  the  twin 
peaks  of  Pinacate  appeared  ahead  of  us,  and 
the  sand  gave  place  to  a  waste  of  red  and  black 
lava,  broken  by  steep  arroyos.  We  had  been 
hearing  coyotes  during  the  night,  and  now  a 
couple  jumped  up  from  some  rocks,  a  hundred 
yards  away,  and  made  oflE  amongst  the  lava. 

By  eight  o'clock  the  sun  was  fiercely  hot, 
but  we  were  in  among  the  foot-hills  of  Pinacate. 
I  asked  Casares  where  the  tanks  were,  and  he 
seemed  rather  vague,  but  said  they  were  be- 
yond the  next  hills.  They  were  not;  but 
several  times  more  he  felt  sure  they  were 
"just  around  the  next  hill."  I  realized  that 
we  were  lost  and  resolved  to  give  him  one  more 
try,  and  then  if  I  found  that  he  was  totally  at 
sea  as  to  the  whereabouts  of  the  tank,  I  in- 
tended to  find  some  shelter  for  the  heat  of  the 
day,  and,  when  it  got  cooler,  to  throw  the 
packs  oflf  our  animals  and  strike  back  to  Tula. 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     87 

It  Is  difficult  to  realize  how  quickly  that  fierce 
sun  dries  up  man  and  beast.  I  doubt  if  in 
that  country  a  really  good  walker  could  have 
covered  ten  miles  in  the  noonday  heat  without 
water  and  without  stopping.  We  could  have 
made  Tule  all  right,  but  the  return  trip  would 
have  been  a  very  unpleasant  one,  and  we 
would  probably  have  lost  some  of  our  animals. 
However,  just  before  we  reached  Casares's 
last  location  of  the  Papago  tanks,  we  came 
upon  an  unknown  water-hole,  in  the  bed  of  an 
arroyo.  The  rains  there  are  very  local,  and 
although  the  rest  of  the  country  was  as  dry  as 
tinder,  some  fairly  recent  downpour  had  filled 
up  this  little  rocky  basin.  There  were  two 
trees  near  it,  a  mesquite  and  a  palo  verde,  and 
though  neither  would  fit  exactly  into  the  cate- 
gory of  shade-trees,  we  were  most  grateful 
to  them  for  being  there  at  all.  The  palo  verde 
is  very  deceptive.  When  seen  from  a  distance, 
its  greenness  gives  it  a  false  air  of  being  a 
lovely,  restful  screen  from  the  sun,  but  when 
one  tries  to  avail  oneself  of  its  shade,  the 
fallacy  is  soon  evident.  It  is  only  when  there 
is  some  parasitical  mistletoe  growing  on  it 
that  the  palo  verde  offers  any  real  shade. 
The  horses  were  very  thirsty,  and  it  was  a 


88    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

revelation  to  see  how  they  lowered  the  water 
in  the  pool. 

Dominguez  was  only  about  thirty  years 
old,  but  he  seemed  jaded  and  tired,  whereas 
Casares,  who  was  white-haired,  and  must 
have  been  at  least  sixty,  was  as  fresh  as  ever. 
Two  days  later,  when  I  was  off  hunting  on 
the  mountains,  Casares  succeeded  in  finding 
the  Papago  tanks;  they  were  about  fifteen 
miles  to  our  northwest,  and  were  as  dry  as  a 
bone!  I  later  learned  that  a  Mexican  had 
come  through  this  country  some  three  weeks 
before  we  were  in  there.  He  had  a  number  of 
pack-animals.  When  he  found  the  Papago 
dry,  he  struck  on  for  the  next  water,  and  suc- 
ceeded in  making  it  only  after  abandoning  his 
packs  and  losing  most  of  his  horses. 

We  sat  under  our  two  trees  during  the  heat 
of  the  day;  but  shortly  after  four  I  took  my 
rifle  and  my  canteen  and  went  off  to  look  for 
sheep,  leaving  the  two  Mexicans  in  camp. 
Although  I  saw  no  rams,  I  found  plenty  of 
sign  and  got  a  good  idea  of  the  lay  of  the  land. 

The  next  four  or  five  days  I  spent  hunting 
from  this  camp,  I  was  very  anxious  to  get 
some  antelope,  and  I  spent  three  or  four  days 
in  a  fruitless  search  for  them.    It  was,  I  be- 


Casares  on  his  white  mule 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT    89 

Heve,  unusually  dry,  even  for  that  country, 
and  the  antelope  had  migrated  to  better  feed- 
ing-grounds. Aside  from  a  herd  of  nine, 
which  I  saw  from  a  long  way  oflf  but  failed 
to  come  up  with,  not  only  did  I  not  see  any 
antelope,  but  I  did  not  even  find  any  fresh 
tracks.  There  were  many  very  old  tracks, 
and  I  have  no  doubt  that,  at  certain  times  of 
the  year,  there  are  great  numbers  of  antelope 
in  the  country  over  which  I  was  hunting. 

The  long  rides,  however,  were  full  of  interest. 
I  took  the  Mexicans  on  alternate  days,  and  we 
always  left  camp  before  daylight.  As  the 
hours  wore  on,  the  sun  would  grow  hotter  and 
hotter.  In  the  middle  of  the  day  there  was 
generally  a  breeze  blowing  across  the  lava- 
beds,  and  that  breeze  was  like  the  blast  from 
a  furnace.  There  are  few  whom  the  desert, 
at  sunset  and  sunrise,  fails  to  fascinate;  but 
only  those  who  have  the  love  of  the  wastes 
born  in  them  feel  the  magic  of  their  appeal 
under  the  scorching  noonday  sun.  Reptile 
life  was  abundant;  lizards  scuttled  away  in 
every  direction;  there  were  some  rather  large 
ones  that  held  their  tails  up  at  an  oblique 
angle  above  the  ground  as  they  ran,  which 
gave  them  a  ludicrous  appearance.    A  species 


90    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

of  toad  whose  back  was  speckled  with  red  was 
rather  common.  Jack-rabbits  and  cottontails 
were  fairly  numerous,  and  among  the  birds 
Gambel's  quail  and  the  whitewings,  or  sonora 
pigeons,  were  most  in  evidence.  I  came  upon 
one  of  these  later  on  her  nest  in  a  palo-verde- 
tree;  the  eggs  were  about  the  size  of  a  robin's 
and  were  white,  and  the  nest  was  made  chiefly 
of  galleta-grass.  The  whitewings  are  very 
fond  of  the  fruit  of  the  saguaro;  this  fruit  is 
of  a  reddish-orange  color  when  ripe,  and  the 
birds  peck  a  hole  in  it  and  eat  the  scarlet  pulp 
within.  It  is  delicious,  and  the  Indians  col- 
lect it  and  dry  it;  the  season  was  over  when  I 
was  in  the  country,  but  there  was  some  late 
fruit  on  a  few  of  the  trees.  When  I  was  back 
in  camp  at  sunset  it  was  pleasant  to  hear  the 
pigeons  trilling  as  they  flew  down  to  the  pool 
to  drink. 

One  day  we  returned  to  the  camp  at  about 
two.  I  was  rather  hot  and  tired,  so  I  made  a 
cup  of  tea  and  sat  under  the  trees  and  smoked 
my  pipe  until  almost  four.  Then  I  picked  up 
my  rifle  and  went  out  by  myself  to  look  for 
sheep.  I  climbed  to  the  top  of  a  great  crater 
hill  and  sat  down  to  look  around  with  my  field- 
glasses.    Hearing   a    stone   move    behind,    I 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     91 

turned  very  slowly  around.  About  a  hundred 
and  jBfty  yards  oflF,  on  the  rim  of  the  crater, 
stood  six  sheep,  two  of  them  fine  rams.  Very 
slowly  I  put  down  the  field-glasses  and  raised 
my  rifle,  and  I  killed  the  finer  of  the  rams. 
It  was  getting  dark,  so,  without  bestowing  more 
than  a  passing  look  upon  him,  I  struck  oflF  for 
camp  at  a  round  pace.  Now  the  Mexicans, 
although  good  enough  in  the  saddle,  were  no 
walkers,  and  so  Dominguez  saddled  a  horse, 
put  a  pack-saddle  on  a  mule,  and  followed  me 
back  to  where  the  sheep  lay.  We  left  the 
animals  at  the  foot  of  the  hill,  and  although 
it  was  not  a  particularly  hard  climb  up  to  the 
sheep,  the  Mexican  was  blown  and  weary  by 
the  time  we  reached  it.  The  ram  was  a  good 
one.  His  horns  measured  sixteen  and  three- 
fourths  inches  around  the  base  and  were 
thirty-five  inches  long,  so  they  were  larger 
in  circumference  though  shorter  than  my 
first  specimen.  He  was  very  thin,  however, 
and  his  hair  was  falling  out,  so  that  one  could 
pull  it  out  in  handfuls.  All  the  sheep  that  I 
saw  in  this  country  seemed  thin  and  in  poor 
shape,  while  those  near  Tinah'alta  were  in 
very  fair  condition.  The  extreme  dryness  and 
scarcity  of  grass  doubtless  in  part  accounted 


92    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

for  this,  although  the  country  in  which  I  got 
my  first  two  sheep  was  in  no  sense  green. 
Making  our  way  back  to  camp  through  the 
lava-fields  and  across  the  numerous  gullies 
was  a  difficult  task.  The  horses  got  along 
much  better  than  I  should  have  supposed;  in- 
deed, they  didn't  seem  to  find  as  much  dif- 
ficulty as  I  did.  Dominguez  muttered  that  if 
the  road  past  Tule  was  the  Camino  del  Diablo, 
this  certainly  was  the  Camino  del  Infierno ! 
When  we  reached  camp  my  clothes  were  as 
wet  as  if  I  had  been  in  swimming.  I  set  right 
to  work  on  the  headskin,  but  it  was  eleven 
o'clock  before  I  had  finished  it;  that  meant 
but  four  hours'  sleep  for  me,  and  I  felt  some- 
what melancholy  about  it.  Indeed,  on  this 
trip,  the  thing  that  I  chiefly  felt  was  the  need 
of  sleep,  for  it  was  always  necessary  to  make 
a  very  early  start,  and  it  was  generally  after 
sunset  before  I  got  back  to  camp. 

The  Mexicans  spoke  about  as  much  English 
as  I  spoke  Spanish,  which  was  very  little,  and 
as  they  showed  no  signs  of  learning,  I  set  to 
work  to  learn  some  Spanish.  At  first  our  con- 
versation was  very  limited,  but  I  soon  got  so 
that  I  could  understand  them  pretty  well.  We 
occasionally  tried  to   tell  each   other   stories 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     93 

but  became  so  confused  that  we  would  have 
to  call  it  off.  Dominguez  had  one  English  ex- 
pression which  he  would  pronounce  with  great 
pride  and  emphasis  on  all  appropriate  or  inap- 
propriate occasions;  it  was  "You  betcher!" 
Once  he  and  I  had  some  discussion  as  to  what 
day  it  was  and  I  appealed  to  Casares.  "Ah, 
quien  sabe,  quien  sabe?"  (who  knows,  who 
knows?)  was  his  reply;  he  said  that  he  never 
knew  what  day  it  was  and  got  on  very  com- 
fortably without  knowing — a  point  of  view 
which  gave  one  quite  a  restful  feeling.  They 
christened  our  water-hole  Tinaja  del  Bevora, 
which  means  the  tank  of  the  rattlesnake. 
They  so  named  it  because  of  the  advent  in 
camp  one  night  of  a  rattler.  It  escaped  and 
got  in  a  small  lava-cave,  from  out  of  which  the 
men  tried  long  and  unsuccessfully  to  smoke  it. 
At  the  place  where  we  were  camped  our  ar- 
royo  had  tunnelled  its  way  along  the  side  of  a 
hill;  so  that,  from  its  bed,  one  bank  was  about 
ten  feet  high  and  the  other  nearer  fifty.  In 
the  rocky  wall  of  this  latter  side  there  were 
many  caves.  One,  in  particular,  would  have 
furnished  good  sleeping  quarters  for  wet 
weather.  It  was  about  twenty-five  feet  long 
and  fifteen  feet  deep,  and  it  varied  in  height 


94    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

from  four  to  six  feet.  The  signs  showed  that 
for  generations  it  had  been  a  favorite  abode 
of  sheep;  coyotes  had  also  lived  in  it,  and  in 
the  back  there  was  a  big  pack-rat's  nest. 
Pieces  of  the  bisnaga  cactus,  with  long,  cruel 
spikes,  formed  a  prominent  part  of  the  nest. 

After  I  had  hunted  for  antelope  in  every 
direction  from  camp,  and  within  as  large  a 
radius  as  I  could  manage,  I  was  forced  to  ad- 
mit the  hopelessness  of  the  task.  The  water- 
supply  was  getting  low,  but  I  determined  to 
put  in  another  good  long  day  with  the  sheep 
before  turning  back.  Accordingly,  early  one 
morning,  I  left  the  two  Mexicans  in  camp  to 
rest  and  set  off  for  the  mountains  on  foot.  I 
headed  for  the  main  peak  of  Pinacate.  It  was 
not  long  before  I  got  in  among  the  foot-hills. 
I  kept  down  along  the  ravines,  for  it  was 
very  early,  and  as  a  rule  the  sheep  didn't  be- 
gin to  go  up  the  hills  from  their  night's  feed- 
ing until  nine  or  ten  o'clock;  at  this  place, 
also,  they  almost  always  spent  the  noon  hours 
in  caves.  There  were  many  little  chipmunks 
running  along  with  their  tails  arched  forward 
over  their  backs,  which  gave  them  rather  a 
comical  look.  At  length  I  saw  a  sheep;  he 
was  well  up  the  side  of  a  large  hill,  an  old 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT    95 

crater,  as  were  many  of  these  mountains.  I 
made  off  after  him  and  found  there  were  steep 
ravines  to  be  reckoned  with  before  I  even 
reached  the  base  of  the  hill.  The  sides  of 
the  crater  were  covered  with  choyas,  and  the 
footing  on  the  loose  lava  was  so  uncertain  that 
I  said  to  myself,  "I  wonder  how  long  it  will 
be  before  you  fall  into  one  of  these  choyas," 
and  only  a  few  minutes  later  I  was  gingerly 
picking  choya  burrs  off  my  arms,  which  had 
come  off  worst  in  the  fall.  The  points  of  the 
spikes  are  barbed  and  are  by  no  means  easy 
to  pull  out.  I  stopped  many  times  to  wait  for 
my  courage  to  rise  sufficiently  to  start  to  work 
again,  and  by  the  time  I  had  got  myself  free 
I  was  so  angry  that  I  felt  like  devoting  the 
rest  of  my  day  to  waging  a  war  of  retaliation 
upon  the  cactus.  The  pain  from  the  places 
from  which  I  had  pulled  out  the  spikes  lasted 
for  about  half  an  hour  after  I  was  free  of  them, 
and  later,  at  Yuma,  I  had  to  have  some  of  the 
spines  that  I  had  broken  off  in  my  flesh  cut 
out. 

An  hour  or  so  later  I  came  across  a  very 
fine  bisnaga,  or  "niggerhead,"  cactus.  I  was 
feeling  very  thirsty,  and,  wishing  to  save  my 
canteen  as  long  as  possible,  I  decided  to  cut 


96    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

the  bisnaga  open  and  eat  some  of  its  pulp, 
for  this  cactus  always  contains  a  good  supply 
of  sweetish  water.  As  I  was  busy  trying  to 
remove  the  long  spikes,  I  heard  a  rock  fall, 
and  looking  round  saw  a  sheep  walking  along 
the  opposite  side  of  the  gully,  and  not  more  than 
four  hundred  yards  away.  He  was  travelling 
slowly  and  had  not  seen  me,  so  I  hastily  made 
for  a  little  ridge  toward  which  he  was  heading. 
I  reached  some  rocks  near  the  top  of  the  ridge 
in  safety  and  crouched  behind  them.  I  soon 
saw  that  he  was  only  a  two-year-old,  and 
when  he  was  two  hundred  yards  off  I  stood  up 
to  have  a  good  look  at  him.  When  he  saw 
me,  instead  of  immediately  making  off,  he 
stood  and  gazed  at  me.  I  slowly  sat  down  and 
his  curiosity  quite  overcame  him.  He  pro- 
ceeded to  stalk  me  in  a  most  scientific  manner, 
taking  due  advantage  of  choyas  and  rocks; 
and  cautiously  poking  his  head  out  from  be- 
hind them  to  stare  at  me.  He  finally  got  to 
within  fifty  feet  of  me,  but  suddenly,  and  for 
no  apparent  reason,  he  took  fright  and  made 
off.  He  did  not  go  far,  and,  from  a  distance 
of  perhaps  five  hundred  yards,  watched  me  as 
I  resumed  operations  on  the  cactus. 

Not  long  after  this,  as  I  was  standing  on  the 


03, 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     97 

top  of  a  hill,  I  made  out  two  sheep,  half  hidden 
in  a  draw.  There  was  a  great  difference  in 
the  size  of  their  horns,  and,  in  the  hasty  glance 
I  got  of  them,  one  seemed  to  me  to  be  big 
enough  to  warrant  shooting.  I  did  not  dis- 
cover my  mistake  until  I  had  brought  down  my 
game.  He  was  but  a  two-year-old,  and,  al- 
though I  should  have  been  glad  of  a  good  speci- 
men for  the  museum,  his  hide  was  in  such  poor 
condition  that  it  was  quite  useless.  However, 
I  took  his  head  and  some  meat  and  headed 
back  for  camp.  My  camera,  water-bottle, 
and  field-glasses  were  already  slung  over  my 
shoulder,  and  the  three  hours'  tramp  back 
to  camp,  in  the  very  hottest  part  of  the  day, 
was  tiring;  and  I  didn't  feel  safe  in  finishing 
my  canteen  until  I  could  see  camp. 

The  next  day  we  collected  as  much  galleta- 
grass  as  we  could  for  the  horses,  and,  having 
watered  them  well,  an  operation  which  prac- 
tically finished  our  pool,  we  set  out  for  Tule  at 
a  little  after  three.  As  soon  as  the  Mexicans 
got  a  little  saddle-stiff  they  would  stand  up 
in  one  stirrup,  crooking  the  other  knee  over 
the  saddle,  and  keeping  the  free  heel  busy  at 
the  horses'  ribs.  The  result  was  twofold:  the 
first  and  most  obvious  being  a  sore  back  for 


98    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

the  horses,  and  the  second  being  that  the  horses 
became  so  accustomed  to  a  continual  tattoo  to 
encourage  them  to  improve  their  pace,  that, 
with  a  rider  unaccustomed  to  that  method, 
they  lagged  most  annoyingly.  The  ride  back 
to  Tule  was  as  uneventful  as  it  was  lovely. 

On  the  next  day's  march,  from  Tule  toward 
Win's  tank,  I  saw  the  only  Gila  monster — 
the  sluggish,  poisonous  lizard  of  the  south- 
western deserts — that  I  came  across  through- 
out the  trip.  He  was  crossing  the  trail  in 
leisurely  fashion  and  darted  his  tongue  out 
angrily  as  I  stopped  to  admire  him.  Utting 
told  me  of  an  interesting  encounter  he  once 
saw  between  a  Gila  monster  and  a  rattlesnake. 
He  put  the  two  in  a  large  box;  they  were  in 
opposite  corners,  but  presently  the  Gila  mon- 
ster started  slowly  and  sedately  toward  the 
rattler's  side  of  the  box.  He  paid  absolutely 
no  attention  to  the  snake,  who  coiled  himself 
up  and  rattled  angrily.  When  the  lizard  got 
near  enough,  the  rattler  struck  out  two  or 
three  times,  each  time  burying  his  fangs  in 
the  Gila  monster's  body;  the  latter  showed  not 
the  slightest  concern,  and,  though  Utting 
waited  expectantly  for  him  to  die,  he  appar- 
ently suflFered  no  ill  effects  whatever  from  the 


THE  SHEEP  OF  THE  DESERT     99 

encounter.  He  showed  neither  anger  nor  pain; 
he  simply  did  not  worry  himself  about  the  rat- 
tler at  all. 

We  reached  Wellton  at  about  nine  in  the 
evening  of  the  second  day  from  Pinacate. 
We  had  eaten  all  our  food,  and  our  pack-ani- 
mals were  practically  without  loads;  so  we 
had  made  ninety  miles  in  about  fifty-five  hours. 
Dominguez  had  suflFered  from  the  heat  on 
the  way  back,  and  at  Win's  tank,  which  was 
inaccessible  to  the  horses,  I  had  been  obliged 
myself  to  pack  all  the  water  out  to  the  animals. 
At  Wellton  I  parted  company  with  the  Mexi- 
cans, with  the  regret  one  always  feels  at  leav- 
ing the  comrades  of  a  hunting  trip  that  has 
proved  both  interesting  and  successful. 


IV 

After  Moose  in  New  Brunswick 


IV 

AFTER  MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK 

It  was  early  in  September  when  the  four  of 
us — Clarke,  Jamieson,  Thompson,  and  myself 
— landed  at  Bathurst,  on  Chaleur  Bay,  and 
took  the  little  railroad  which  runs  twenty 
miles  up  the  Nepisiquit  River  to  some  iron- 
mines.  From  that  point  we  expected  to  pole 
up  the  river  about  forty  miles  farther  and 
then  begin  our  hunting. 

For  the  four  hunters — "sports"  was  what 
the  guides  called  us — there  were  six  guides. 
Three  of  them  bore  the  name  Venneau;  there 
were  Bill  Grey  and  his  son  Willie,  and  the 
sixth  was  Wirre  (pronounced  Warry)  Cham- 
berlain. Among  themselves  the  guides  spoke 
French — or  a  corruption  of  French — which 
was  hard  to  understand  and  which  has  come 
down  from  generation  to  generation  without 
ever  getting  into  written  form.  A  fine-look- 
ing six  they  were, — straight, — ^with  the  Indian 
showing  in  their  faces. 

103 


104   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

At  the  end  of  the  third  day  of  poling — a  lazy 
time  for  the  "sports,"  but  three  days  of  mar- 
vellously skilful  work  for  the  guides — our 
heavily  laden  canoes  were  brought  up  to  the 
main  camp.  From  here  we  expected  to  start 
our  hunting  expeditions,  each  taking  a  guide, 
blankets,  and  food,  and  striking  oflf  for  the 
more  isolated  cabins  in  the  woods.  My  pur- 
pose was  to  collect  specimens  for  the  National 
Museum  at  Washington.  I  wanted  moose, 
caribou,  and  beaver — a  male  and  female  of 
each  species.  Whole  skins  and  leg-bones  were 
to  be  brought  out. 

A  hard  rain  woke  us,  and  the  prospects 
were  far  from  cheerful  as  we  packed  and  pre- 
pared to  separate.  Bill  Grey  was  to  be  my 
guide,  and  the  "Popple  Cabin,"  three  miles 
away,  was  to  be  our  shelter.  Our  tramp 
through  the  wet  woods — pine,  hemlock,  birch, 
and  poplar — ended  at  the  little  double  lean- 
to  shelter.  After  we  had  started  a  fire  and 
spread  our  blankets  to  dry  we  set  oflf  in  search 
of  game. 

We  climbed  out  of  the  valley  in  which  we 
were  camped  and  up  to  the  top  of  a  hill  from 
which  we  could  get  a  good  view  of  some  small 
barren  stretches  that  lay  around  us.    It  was 


MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK    105 

the  blueberry  season,  and  these  barrens  were 
covered  with  bushes,  all  heavily  laden.  We 
moved  around  from  hill  to  hill  in  search  of 
game,  but  saw  only  three  deer.  We'd  have 
shot  one  of  them  for  meat,  but  didn't  care  to 
run  the  chance  of  frightening  away  any  moose 
or  caribou.  The  last  hill  we  climbed  over- 
looked a  small  pond  which  lay  beside  a  pine 
forest  on  the  edge  of  a  barren  strip.  Bill  in- 
tended to  spend  a  good  part  of  each  day  watch- 
ing this  pond,  and  it  was  to  a  small  hill  over- 
looking it  that  we  made  our  way  early  next 
morning. 

Before  we  had  been  watching  many  minutes, 
a  cow  moose  with  a  calf  appeared  at  the  edge 
of  the  woods.  She  hesitated  for  several  min- 
utes, listening  intently  and  watching  sharply, 
and  then  stepped  out  across  the  barren  on  her 
way  to  the  pond.  Before  she  had  gone  far, 
the  path  she  was  following  cut  the  trail  we 
had  made  on  our  way  to  the  lookout  hiU.  She 
stopped  immediately  and  began  to  sniff  at 
our  tracks,  the  calf  following  her  example; 
a  few  seconds  were  enough  to  convince  her, 
but  for  some  reason,  perhaps  to  make  doubly 
sure,  she  turned  and  for  some  minutes  followed 
along  our  trail  with  her  nose  close  to  the  ground. 


106   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

Then  she  swung  round  and  struck  off  into  the 
woods  at  a  great  slashing  moose  trot. 

Not  long  after  she  had  disappeared,  we  got 
a  fleeting  glimpse  of  two  caribou  cows;  they 
lacked  the  impressive  ungainliness  of  the  moose, 
and  in  the  distance  might  easily  have  been 
mistaken  for  deer. 

It  was  a  very  cold  morning,  and  throughout 
the  day  it  snowed  and  sleeted  at  intervals. 
We  spent  the  time  wandering  from  hill  to  hill. 

For  the  next  week  we  hunted  industriously 
in  every  direction  from  the  Popple  Cabin.  In 
the  morning  and  the  evening  we  shifted  from 
hill  to  hill;  the  middle  of  the  day  we  hunted 
along  the  numerous  brooks  that  furrowed  the 
country.  With  the  exception  of  one  or  two 
days,  the  weather  was  uniformly  cold  and 
rainy;  but  after  our  first  warm  sunny  day  we 
welcomed  rain  and  cold,  for  then,  at  least,  we 
had  no  black  flies  to  fight.  On  the  two  sunny 
days  they  surrounded  us  in  swarms  and  made 
life  almost  unbearable;  they  got  into  our 
blankets  and  kept  us  from  sleeping  during  the 
nights;  they  covered  us  with  lumps  and  sores 
— Bill  said  that  he  had  never  seen  them  as 
bad. 

It  was  lovely  in  the  early  morning  to  stand 


MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK    107 

on  some  high  hill  and  watch  the  mist  rising 
lazily  from  the  valley;  it  was  even  more  lovely 
to  watch  the  approach  of  a  rain-storm.  The 
sunlight  on  some  distant  hillside  or  valley 
would  suddenly  be  blotted  out  by  a  sheet  of 
rain;  a  few  minutes  later  the  next  valley  would 
be  darkened  as  the  storm  swept  toward  us, 
and  perhaps  before  it  reached  us  we  could  see 
the  farther  valleys  over  which  it  had  passed 
lightening  again. 

We  managed  to  cover  a  great  deal  of  ground 
during  that  week,  and  were  rewarded  by  see- 
ing a  fair  amount  of  game — four  caribou,  of 
which  one  was  a  bull,  a  bull  and  three  cow 
moose,  and  six  does  and  one  buck  deer.  I 
had  but  one  shot,  and  that  was  at  a  buck  deer. 
We  wanted  meat  very  much,  and  Bill  said  that 
he  didn't  think  one  shot  would  disturb  the 
moose  and  caribou.  He  was  a  very  large 
buck,  in  prime  condition;  I  never  tasted  better 
venison.  Had  our  luck  been  a  little  better, 
I  would  have  had  a  shot  at  a  moose  and  a  cari- 
bou; we  saw  the  latter  from  some  distance, 
and  made  a  long  and  successful  stalk  until 
Wirre,  on  his  way  from  the  main  camp  with 
some  fresh  supplies,  frightened  our  quarry 
away. 


108   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

On  these  trips  between  camps,  Wirre  several 
times  saw  moose  and  caribou  within  range. 

After  a  week  we  all  foregathered  at  the  main 
camp.  Clarke  had  shot  a  fine  bear  and  Jamie- 
son  brought  in  a  good  moose  head.  They 
started  down-river  with  their  trophies,  and 
Thompson  and  I  set  out  for  new  hunting- 
grounds.  As  Bill  had  gone  with  Jamieson,  I 
took  his  son  Willie,  a  sturdy,  pony-built  fellow 
of  just  my  age.  We  crossed  the  river  and 
camped  some  two  miles  beyond  it  and  about 
a  mile  from  the  lake  we  intended  to  hunt. 
We  put  up  a  lean-to,  and  in  front  of  it  built  a 
great  fire  of  old  pine  logs,  for  the  nights  were 
cold. 

My  blankets  were  warm,  and  it  was  only 
after  a  great  deal  of  wavering  hesitation  that 
I  could  pluck  up  courage  to  roll  out  of  them  in 
the  penetrating  cold  of  early  morning.  On 
the  second  morning,  as  we  made  our  way 
through  dew-soaked  underbrush  to  the  lake, 
we  came  out  upon  a  little  glade,  at  the  farther 
end  of  which  stood  a  caribou.  He  sprang 
away  as  he  saw  us,  but  halted  behind  a  bush 
to  reconnoitre — the  victim  of  a  fatal  curiosity, 
for  it  gave  me  my  opportunity  and  I  brought 
him  down.     Although  he  was  large  in  body,  he 


MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK    109 

had  a  very  poor  head.  I  spent  a  busy  morning 
preparing  the  skin,  but  in  the  afternoon  we 
were  again  at  the  lake  watching  for  moose. 
We  spent  several  fruitless  days  there. 

One  afternoon  a  yearling  bull  moose  ap- 
peared: he  had  apparently  lost  his  mother,  for 
he  wandered  aimlessly  around  for  several  hours, 
bewailing  his  fate.  This  watching  would  have 
been  pleasant  enough  as  a  rest-cure,  but 
since  I  was  hunting  and  very  anxious  to  get 
my  game,  it  became  a  rather  irksome  affair. 
However,  I  could  only  follow  Saint  Augustine's 
advice,  "when  in  Rome,  fast  on  Saturdays," 
and  I  resigned  myself  to  adopting  Willie's 
plan  of  waiting  for  the  game  to  come  to  us 
instead  of  pursuing  my  own  inclination  and 
setting  out  to  find  the  game.  Luckily,  I  had 
some  books  with  me,  and  passed  the  days 
pleasantly  enough  reading  Voltaire  and  Boi- 
leau.  There  was  a  beaver-house  at  one  end 
of  the  lake,  and  between  four  and  five  the 
beaver  would  come  out  and  swim  around.  I 
missed  a  shot  at  one.  Red  squirrels  were  very 
plentiful  and  would  chatter  excitedly  at  us 
from  a  distance  of  a  few  feet.  There  was  one 
particularly  persistent  little  chap  who  did 
everything  in  his  power  to  attract  attention. 


110   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

He  would  sit  in  the  conventional  squirrel  atti- 
tude upon  a  branch,  and  chirp  loudly,  bouncing 
stiffly  forward  at  each  chirp,  precisely  as  if  he 
were  an  automaton. 

When  we  decided  that  it  was  useless  to  hunt 
this  lake  any  longer,  we  went  back  to  the 
river  to  put  in  a  few  days  hunting  up  and  down 
it.  I  got  back  to  the  camp  in  the  evening  and 
found  Thompson  there.  He  had  had  no  luck 
and  intended  to  leave  for  the  settlement  in 
the  morning.  Accordingly,  the  next  day  he 
started  down-stream  and  we  went  up.  We 
hadn't  been  gone  long  before  we  heard  what 
we  took  to  be  two  shots,  though,  for  all  we 
knew,  they  might  have  been  a  beaver  striking 
the  water  with  his  tail.  That  night,  when  we 
got  back  to  camp,  we  found  that,  on  going 
round  a  bend  in  the  river  about  a  mile  below 
camp,  Thompson  had  come  upon  a  bull  and  a 
cow  moose,  and  had  bagged  the  bull. 

The  next  morning  it  was  raining  as  if  it 
were  the  first  storm  after  a  long  drought,  and 
as  we  felt  sure  that  no  sensible  moose  would 
wander  around  much  amid  such  a  frozen 
downpour,  we  determined  to  put  in  a  day 
after  beaver.  In  one  of  my  long  tramps  with 
Bill  we  had  come  across  a  large  beaver-pond. 


MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK    111 

and  at  the  time  Bill  had  remarked  how  easy  it 
would  be  to  break  the  dam  and  shoot  the 
beaver.  I  had  carefully  noted  the  location  of 
this  pond,  so  managed  successfully  to  pilot 
Willie  to  it,  and  we  set  to  work  to  let  the  water 
out.  This  breaking  the  dam  was  not  the 
easy  matter  I  had  imagined.  It  was  a  big 
pond,  and  the  dam  that  was  stretched  across 
its  lower  end  was  from  eight  to  ten  feet  high. 
To  look  at  its  solid  structure  and  the  size  of 
the  logs  that  formed  it,  it  seemed  inconceiva- 
ble that  an  animal  the  size  of  a  beaver  could 
have  built  it.  The  water  was  above  our 
heads,  and  there  was  a  crust  of  ice  around  the 
edges*  We  had  to  get  in  and  work  waist- 
deep  in  the  water  to  enlarge  our  break  in  the 
dam,  and  the  very  remembrance  of  that  cold 
morning's  work,  trying  to  pry  out  logs  with 
frozen  fingers,  makes  me  shiver.  It  was  even 
worse  when  we  had  to  stop  work  and  wait 
and  watch  for  the  beavers  to  come  out.  They 
finally  did,  and  I  shot  two.  They  were  fine 
large  specimens;  the  male  was  just  two  inches 
less  than  four  feet  and  the  female  only  one  inch 
shorter.  Shivering  and  frozen,  we  headed 
back  for  camp.  My  hunting  costume  had 
caused  a  good  deal  of  comment  among  the 


112   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

guides;  it  consisted  of  a  sleeveless  cotton  un- 
dershirt, a  many-pocketed  coat,  a  pair  of  short 
khaki  trousers  reaching  to  just  above  my 
knees,  and  then  a  pair  of  sneakers  or  of  high 
boots — ^I  used  the  former  when  I  wished  to 
walk  quietly.  My  knees  were  always  bare 
and  were  quite  as  impervious  to  cold  as  my 
hands,  but  the  guides  could  never  understand 
why  I  didn't  freeze.  I  used  to  hear  them 
solemnly  discussing  it  in  their  broken  French. 

I  had  at  first  hoped  to  get  my  moose  by  fair 
stalking,  without  the  help  of  calling,  but  I 
had  long  since  abandoned  that  hope;  and 
Willie,  who  was  an  excellent  caller,  had  been 
doing  his  best,  but  with  no  result.  We  saw 
several  cow  moose,  and  once  Willie  called  out 
a  young  bull,  but  his  horns  could  not  have  had 
a  spread  of  more  than  thirty-five  inches,  and 
he  would  have  been  quite  useless  as  a  museum 
specimen.  Another  time,  when  we  were  crawl- 
ing up  to  a  lake  not  far  from  the  river,  we  found 
ourselves  face  to  face  with  a  two-year-old 
bull.  He  was  very  close  to  us,  but  as  he  hadn't 
got  our  wind,  he  was  merely  curious  to  find  out 
what  we  were,  for  Willie  kept  grunting  through 
his  birch-bark  horn.  Once  he  came  up  to 
within  twenty  feet  of  us  and  stood  gazing. 


MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK    113 

Finally  he  got  our  wind  and  crashed  off  through 
the  lakeside  alders. 

As  a  rule,  moose  answer  a  call  better  at 
night,  and  almost  every  night  we  could  hear 
them  calling  around  our  camp;  generally  they 
were  cows  that  we  heard,  and  once  Willie 
had  a  duel  with  a  cow  as  to  which  should 
have  a  young  bull  that  we  could  hear  in  an 
alder  thicket,  smashing  the  bushes  with  his 
horns.  Willie  finally  triumphed,  and  the  bull 
headed  toward  us  with  a  most  disconcerting 
rush;  next  morning  we  found  his  tracks  at 
the  edge  of  the  clearing  not  more  than  twenty 
yards  from  where  we  had  been  standing; 
at  that  point  the  camp  smoke  and  smells 
had  proved  more  convincing  than  Willie's 
calling-horn. 

Late  one  afternoon  I  had  a  good  oppor- 
tunity to  watch  some  beaver  at  work.  We 
had  crawled  cautiously  up  to  a  small  lake  in 
the  vain  hope  of  finding  a  moose,  when  we 
came  upon  some  beaver  close  to  the  shore. 
Their  house  was  twenty  or  thirty  yards  away, 
and  they  were  bringing  out  a  supply  of  wood, 
chiefly  poplar,  for  winter  food.  To  and  fro 
they  swam,  pushing  the  wood  in  front  of  them. 
Occasionally  one  would  feel  hungry,  and  then 


114   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

he  would  stop  and  start  eating  the  bark  from 
the  log  he  was  pushing.  It  made  me  shiver 
to  watch  them  lying  lazily  in  that  icy  water. 

I  had  already  stayed  longer  than  I  intended, 
and  the  day  was  rapidly  approaching  when  I 
should  have  to  start  down-river.  Even  the 
cheerful  Willie  was  getting  discouraged,  and 
instead  of  accounts  of  the  miraculous  bags 
hunters  made  at  the  end  of  their  trips,  I  began 
to  be  told  of  people  who  were  unfortunate 
enough  to  go  out  without  anything.  I  made 
up  my  mind  to  put  in  the  last  few  days  hunting 
from  the  Popple  Cabin,  so  one  rainy  noon, 
after  a  morning's  hunt  along  the  river,  we 
shouldered  our  packs  and  tramped  off  to  the 
little  cabin  from  which  Bill  and  I  had  hunted. 
Wirre  was  with  us,  and  we  left  him  to  dry  out 
the  cabin  while  we  went  off  to  try  a  late  after- 
noon's hunt.  As  we  were  climbing  the  hill 
from  which  Bill  and  I  used  to  watch  the  little 
pond,  Willie  caught  sight  of  a  moose  on  the 
side  of  a  hill  a  mile  away.  One  look  through 
our  field-glasses  convinced  us  it  was  a  good 
bull.  A  deep  wooded  valley  intervened,  and 
down  into  it  we  started  at  headlong  speed, 
and  up  the  other  side  we  panted.  As  we 
neared  where  we  believed  the  moose  to  be,  I 


MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK    115 

slowed  down  in  order  to  get  my  wind  in  case  I 
had  to  do  some  quick  shooting.  I  soon  picked 
up  the  moose  and  managed  to  signal  Willie 
to  stop.  The  moose  was  walking  along  at 
the  edge  of  the  woods  somewhat  over  two 
hundred  yards  to  our  left.  The  wind  was  fa- 
vorable, so  I  decided  to  try  to  get  nearer  be- 
fore shooting.  It  was  a  mistake,  for  which  I 
came  close  to  paying  dearly;  suddenly,  and 
without  any  warning,  the  great  animal  swung 
into  the  woods  and  disappeared  before  I  could 
get  ready  to  shoot. 

Willie  had  his  birch-bark  horn  with  him  and 
he  tried  calling,  but  instead  of  coming  toward 
us,  we  could  hear  the  moose  moving  oflf  in  the 
other  direction.  The  woods  were  dense,  and 
all  chance  seemed  to  have  gone.  With  a 
really  good  tracker,  such  as  are  to  be  found 
among  some  of  the  African  tribes,  the  task 
would  have  been  quite  simple,  but  neither 
Willie  nor  I  was  good  enough.  We  had  given 
up  hope  when  we  heard  the  moose  grunt  on 
the  hillside  above  us.  Hurrying  toward  the 
sound,  we  soon  came  into  more  open  country. 
I  saw  him  in  a  little  glade  to  our  right;  he 
looked  most  impressive  as  he  stood  there, 
nearly  nineteen  hands  at  the  withers,  shaking 


116   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

his  antlers  and  staring  at  us;  I  dropped  to 
my  knee  and  shot,  and  that  was  the  first  that 
WiUie  knew  of  our  quarry's  presence.  He 
didn't  go  far  after  my  first  shot,  but  several 
more  were  necessary  before  he  fell.  We  hur- 
ried up  to  examine  him;  he  was  not  yet  dead, 
and  when  we  were  half  a  dozen  yards  away,  he 
staggered  to  his  feet  and  started  for  us,  but 
he  fell  before  he  could  reach  us.  Had  I  shot 
him  the  first  day  I  might  have  had  some  com- 
punction at  having  put  an  end  to  such  a  huge, 
handsome  animal,  but  as  it  was  I  had  no  such 
feelings.  We  had  hunted  long  and  hard,  and 
luck  had  been  consistently  against  us. 

Our  chase  had  led  us  back  in  a  quartering 
direction  toward  camp,  which  was  now  not 
more  than  a  mile  away;  so  Willie  went  to 
get  Wirre,  while  I  set  to  work  to  take  the 
measurements  and  start  on  the  skinning. 
Taking  oflF  a  whole  moose  hide  is  no  light  ta«k, 
and  it  was  well  after  dark  before  we  got  it 
off.  We  estimated  the  weight  of  the  green 
hide  as  well  over  a  hundred  and  fifty  pounds, 
but  probably  less  than  two  hundred.  We 
bundled  it  up  as  well  as  we  could  in  some 
pack-straps,  and  as  I  seemed  best  suited  to  the 
task,  I  fastened  it  on  my  back. 


MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK    117 

The  sun  had  gone  down,  and  that  mile  back 
to  camp,  crawKng  over  dead  falls  and  tripping 
on  stones,  was  one  of  the  longest  I  have  ever 
walked.  The  final  descent  down  the  almost 
perpendicular  hillside  was  the  worst.  When 
I  fell,  the  skin  was  so  heavy  and  such  a  clumsy 
affair  that  I  couldn't  get  up  alone  unless  I 
could  find  a  tree  to  help  me;  but  generally 
Willie  would  start  me  off  again.  When  I 
reached  the  cabin,  in  spite  of  the  cold  night- 
air,  my  clothes  were  as  wet  as  if  I  had  been  in 
swimming.  After  they  had  taken  the  skin  off 
my  shoulders,  I  felt  as  if  I  had  nothing  to 
hold  me  down  to  earth,  and  might  at  any 
moment  go  soaring  into  the  air. 

Next  morning  I  packed  the  skin  down  to 
the  main  camp,  about  three  miles,  but  I  found 
it  a  much  easier  task  in  the  daylight.  After 
working  for  a  while  on  the  skin,  I  set  off  to 
look  for  a  cow  moose,  but,  as  is  always  the 
case,  where  they  had  abounded  before,  there 
was  none  to  be  found  now  that  we  wanted 
one. 

The  next  day  we  spent  tramping  over  the 
barren  hillsides  after  caribou.  Willie  caught  a 
glimpse  of  one,  but  it  disappeared  into  a  pine 
forest  before  we  could  come  up  with  it.    On 


118   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

the  way  back  to  camp  I  shot  a  deer  for  meat  on 
our  way  down  the  river. 

I  had  determined  to  have  one  more  try  for 
a  cow  moose,  and  next  morning  was  just 
going  oflf  to  hunt  some  lakes  when  we  caught 
sight  of  an  old  cow  standing  on  the  opposite 
bank  of  the  river  about  half  a  mile  above  us. 
We  crossed  and  hurried  up  along  the  bank, 
but  when  we  reached  the  bog  where  she  had 
been  standing  she  had  disappeared.  There 
was  a  lake  not  far  from  the  river-bank,  and  we 
thought  that  she  might  have  gone  to  it,  for 
we  felt  sure  we  had  not  frightened  her.  As 
we  reached  the  lake  we  saw  her  standing  at 
the  edge  of  the  woods  on  the  other  side,  half 
hidden  in  the  trees.  I  &ed  and  missed,  but  as 
she  turned  to  make  off  I  broke  her  hind  quar- 
ter. After  going  a  little  distance  she  circled 
back  to  the  lake  and  went  out  to  stand  in  the 
water.  We  portaged  a  canoe  from  the  river 
and  took  some  pictures  before  finishing  the 
cow.  At  the  point  where  she  fell  the  banks  of 
the  lake  were  so  steep  that  we  had  to  give 
up  the  attempt  to  haul  the  carcass  out.  I 
therefore  set  to  work  to  get  the  skin  oflF  where 
the  cow  lay  in  the  water.  It  was  a  slow,  cold 
task,  but  finally  I  finished  and  we  set  off  down- 


Bringing  out  the  trophies  of  the  hunt 


MOOSE  IN  NEW  BRUNSWICK    119 

stream,  Wirre  in  one  canoe  and  Willie  and  my- 
self in  the  other.  According  to  custom,  the 
moose  head  was  laid  in  the  bow  of  our  canoe, 
with  the  horns  curving  out  on  either  side. 

We  had  been  in  the  woods  for  almost  a 
month,  and  in  that  time  we  had  seen  the 
glorious  changes  from  summer  to  fall  and  fall 
to  early  winter,  for  the  trees  were  leafless  and 
bare.  Robinson's  lines  kept  running  through 
my  head  as  we  sped  down-stream  through  the 
frosty  autumn  day: 

"Come  away!    come  away!    there's  a  frost  along  the 

marshes. 
And  a  frozen  wind  that  skims  the  shoal  where  it  shakes 

the  dead  black  water; 
There's  a  moan  across  the  lowland,  and  a  wailing  through 

the  woodland 
Of  a  dirge  that  sings  to  send  us  back  to  the  arms  of  those 

that  love  us. 
There  is  nothing  left  but  ashes  now  where  the  crimson 

chills  of  autumn 
Put  off  the  summer's  languor,  with  a  touch  that  made  us 

glad 
For  the  glory  that  is  gone  from  us,  with  a  iflight  we  can- 
not follow. 
To  the  slopes  of  other  valleys,  and  the  sounds  of  other 

shores." 


Two  Book-Hunters  in 
South  America 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  IN  SOUTH 
AMERICA 

In  Collaboration  with  Mrs.  Kermit  Roosevelt 

The  true  bibliophile  will  always  find  time 
to  exercise  his  calling,  no  matter  where  he 
happens  to  be,  or  in  what  manner  he  is  en- 
gaged in  making  his  daily  bread.  In  some 
South  American  cities,  more  particularly  in 
Buenos  Ayres,  there  is  so  little  to  do  outside 
of  one's  oflSce  that  were  there  more  old  book- 
stores it  would  be  what  Eugene  Field  would 
have  called  a  bibliomaniac's  paradise.  To 
us  wanderers  on  the  face  of  the  earth  serendip- 
ity in  its  more  direct  application  to  book-col- 
lecting is  a  most  satisfactory  pursuit;  for  it 
requires  but  little  capital,  and  in  our  annual 
Sittings  to  "somewhere  else"  our  purchases 
necessitate  but  the  minimum  of  travelling 
space.  There  are  two  classes  of  bibliophiles — 
those  to  whom  the  financial  side  is  of  little  or 
no  consequence,  and  those  who,  like  the  cl«rk 


124    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

of  the  East  India  House,  must  count  their 
pennies,  and  save,  and  go  without  other  things 
to  counterbalance  an  extravagance  in  the  pur- 
chase of  a  coveted  edition.  To  the  former 
class  these  notes  may  seem  overworldly  in 
their  frequent  allusion  to  prices;  but  to  its 
authors  the  financial  side  must  assume  its 
relative  importance. 

Among  the  South  American  republics,  Brazil 
undeniably  takes  precedence  from  a  literary 
standpoint.  Most  Brazilians,  from  Lauro  Mul- 
ler,  the  minister  of  foreign  affairs,  to  the  post- 
master of  the  little  frontier  town,  have  at  some 
period  in  their  lives  published,  or  at  all  events 
written,  a  volume  of  prose  or  verse.  It  comes 
to  them  from  their  natural  surroundings,  and 
by  inheritance,  for  once  you  except  Cervantes, 
the  Portuguese  have  a  greater  literature  than 
the  Spaniards.  There  is  therefore  in  Brazil 
an  excellent  and  widely  read  native  literature, 
and  in  almost  every  home  there  are  to  be  found 
the  works  of  such  poets  as  Gongalves  Diaz  and 
Castro  Alves,  and  historians,  novelists,  and 
essayists  like  Taunay,  Couto  de  Magalhaens, 
Alencar,  and  Coelho  Netto.  Taunay's  most  fa- 
mous novel,  Innocencia,  a  tale  of  life  in  the 
frontier   state   of   Matto   Grosso — "the   great 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  125 

wilderness" — ^has  been  translated  into  seven 
languages,  including  the  Japanese  and  Polish. 
The  literature  of  the  mother  country  is  also 
generally  known;  Camoes  is  read  in  the  schools, 
and  a  quotation  from  the  Lusiads  is  readily 
capped  by  a  casual  acquaintance  in  the  re- 
motest wilderness  town.  Portuguese  poets 
and  playwrights  like  Almeda  Garret,  Bocage, 
Quental  and  Guerra  Junquera;  and  historians 
and  novelists  such  as  Herculano,  Ega  de 
Queiroz,  or  Castello  Branco  are  widely  read. 

In  Brazil,  as  throughout  South  America, 
French  is  almost  universally  read;  cheap  edi- 
tions of  the  classics  are  found  in  most  homes, 
and  bookstores  are  filled  with  modern  French 
writers  of  prose  or  verse — sometimes  in  trans- 
lation, and  as  frequently  in  the  original.  Rio 
de  Janeiro  and  Sao  Paulo  abound  in  old  book- 
stores, which  are  to  be  found  in  fewer  numbers 
in  others  of  the  larger  towns,  such  as  Manaos, 
Para,  Pernambuco,  Bahia,  Curytiba,  or  Porto 
Alegre.  In  the  smaller  towns  of  the  interior 
one  runs  across  only  new  books,  although  occa- 
sionally those  who  possess  the  "flaire"  may 
chance  upon  some  battered  treasure. 

The  line  which  is  of  most  interest,  and  in 
South  America  presents  the  greatest  latitude^ 


126    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

is  undoubtedly  that  of  early  voyages  and  dis- 
coveries. Probably  it  was  because  they  were 
in  a  greater  or  less  degree  voyagers  or  explorers 
themselves  that  the  Americans  and  English 
who  came  to  South  America  seventy  or  eighty 
years  ago  brought  with  them  books  of  explora- 
tion and  travel,  both  contemporary  and  an- 
cient. Many  of  these  volumes,  now  rare  in 
the  mother  country,  are  to  be  picked  up  for  a 
song  in  the  old  bookstores  of  the  New  World. 
The  accounts  of  the  Conquistadores  and 
early  explorers,  now  in  the  main  inaccessible 
except  in  great  private  collections  or  museums, 
have  frequently  been  reprinted,  and  if  written 
in  a  foreign  tongue,  translated,  in  the  country 
which  they  describe.  Thus  the  account  of 
Pere  Yveux  was  translated  and  printed  in 
Maranhao  in  1878,  and  this  translation  is  now 
itself  rare.  We  picked  up  a  copy  for  fifty 
cents  in  a  junk-store  in  Bahia,  but  in  Sao  Paulo 
had  to  pay  the  market  price  for  the  less  rare 
translation  of  Hans  Stade's  captivity.  Ukich 
Schmidel's  entertaining  account  of  the  twenty 
years  of  his  life  spent  in  the  first  half  of  the 
sixteenth  century  in  what  is  now  Argentina, 
Paraguay,  and  Brazil,  has  been  excellently 
translated  into  Spanish  by  an  Argentine  of 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  127 

French  descent,  Lafoyne  Quevedo,  the  head  of 
the  La  Plata  museum.  We  had  never  seen 
the  book  until  one  day  at  the  judicial  auction 
held  by  the  heirs  of  a  prominent  Argentine 
lawyer.  Books  published  in  Buenos  Ayres 
are  as  a  whole  abominably  printed,  but  this 
was  really  beautiful,  so  we  determined  to  get 
it.  The  books  were  being  sold  in  ill-assorted 
lots,  and  this  one  was  with  three  other  volumes; 
one  was  an  odd  volume  of  Italian  poetry,  one 
a  religious  treatise,  and  the  third  a  medical 
book.  Bidding  had  been  low,  and  save  for 
standard  legal  books,  the  lots  had  been  going 
at  two  or  three  dollars  apiece.  Our  lot  quickly 
went  to  five  dollars.  There  was  soon  only  one 
man  bidding  against  us.  We  could  not  under- 
stand what  he  wanted,  but  thought  that  per- 
haps the  Schmidel  was  worth  more  than  we 
had  imagined.  Our  blood  was  up  and  we  be- 
gan trying  to  frighten  our  opponent  by  sub- 
stantial raises;  at  fourteen  he  dropped  out. 
The  dealers  in  common  with  every  one  else  were 
much  intrigued  at  the  high  bidding,  and  clearly 
felt  that  something  had  escaped  them.  The 
mystery  was  solved  when  our  opponent  hurried 
over  to  ask  what  we  wanted  for  the  odd  volume 
of  Italian  verse — it  belonged  to  him  and  he 


128   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

had  loaned  it  to  the  defunct  lawyer  shortly 
before  his  death.  We  halved  the  expenses 
and  the  lot,  and,  as  a  curious  sequel,  later  found 
that  the  medical  book  which  had  quite  acci- 
dentally fallen  to  our  share  was  worth  between 
fifteen  and  twenty  dollars. 

Prices  in  Brazil  seemed  very  high  in  com- 
parison with  those  of  Portugal  and  Spain, 
but  low  when  compared  with  Argentina.  On 
the  west  coast  we  found  books  slightly  less 
expensive  than  in  Brazil,  where,  however,  the 
prices  have  remained  the  same  as  before  the 
war,  though  the  drop  in  exchange  has  given 
the  foreigner  the  benefit  of  a  twenty-five  per 
cent  reduction.  There  are  a  fair  number  of 
auctions,  and  old  books  are  also  sold  through 
priced  lists,  published  in  the  daily  papers.  We 
obtained  our  best  results  by  search  in  the 
bookshops.  It  was  in  this  way  that  we  got 
for  three  dollars  the  first  edition  of  Castelleux's 
Voyage  dans  la  Partie  Septentrionale  de  VAme- 
rique,  in  perfect  condition,  and  for  one  dollar 
Jordan's  Guerra  do  Paraguay,  for  which  a  book- 
seller in  Buenos  Ayres  had  asked,  as  a  tremen- 
dous bargain,  twelve  dollars. 

In  Sao  Paulo  after  much  searching  we  found 
Santos  Saraiva's  paraphrase  of  the  Psalms,  a 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  129 

famous  translation,  quite  as  beautiful  as  our 
own  English  version.  The  translator  was  born 
in  Lisbon.  His  father  was  a  Jewish  rabbi,  but 
he  entered  the  CathoHc  Church,  became  a 
priest,  and  went  to  an  inland  parish  in  southern 
Brazil.  After  some  years  he  left  the  Church 
and  settled  down  with  a  Brazilian  woman  in 
a  small,  out-of-the-way  fazenda,  where  he 
translated  the  Psalms,  and  also  composed  a 
Greek  lexicon  that  is  regarded  as  a  masterpiece. 
He  later  became  instructor  in  Greek  in  Mac- 
kenzie College  in  Sao  Paulo,  confining  his  versa- 
tile powers  to  that  institution  until  he  died. 

The  dearth  of  native  literature  in  Buenos 
Ayres  is  not  surprising,  for  nature  has  done 
little  to  stimulate  it,  and  in  its  fertility  much 
to  create  the  commercialism  that  reigns  su- 
preme. The  country  is  in  large  part  rolling 
prairie-land,  and  although  there  is  an  attrac- 
tion about  it  in  its  wild  state,  which  has  called 
forth  a  gaucho  literature  that  chiefly  takes 
form  in  long  and  crude  ballads,  the  magic  of 
the  prairie-land  is  soon  destroyed  by  houses, 
factories,  dump-heaps,  and  tin  cans.  At  first 
sight  it  would  appear  hopeless  ground  for  a 
bibliophile,  but  with  time  and  patience  we 
found  a  fair  number  of  old  bookstores;    and 


130   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

there  rarely  passes  a  week  without  a  book 
auction,  or  at  any  rate  an  auction  where  some 
books  are  put  up. 

Among  the  pleasantest  memories  of  our  life 
in  Buenos  Ay  res  are  those  of  motoring  in  to  a 
sale  from  our  house  in  Belgrano,  along  the 
famous  Avenida  Alvear,  on  starlit  nights,  with 
the  Southern  Cross  high  and  brilliant.  Occa- 
sionally when  the  books  we  were  interested  in 
were  far  between,  we  would  slip  out  of  the 
smoke-laden  room  for  a  cup  of  unrivalled  coffee 
at  the  Cafe  Paulista,  or  to  watch  Charlie 
Chaplin  as  "Carlitos"  amuse  the  Argentine 
public. 

The  great  percentage  of  the  books  one  sees 
at  auctions  or  in  bookstores  are  strictly  utili- 
tarian; generally  either  on  law  or  medicine. 
In  the  old  bookstores  there  are,  as  in  Boston, 
rows  of  religious  books,  on  which  the  dust  lies 
undisturbed.  In  Argentine  literature  there 
are  two  or  three  famous  novels;  most  famous 
of  these  is  probably  Marmol's  Amalia,  a  blood- 
thirsty and  badly  written  story  of  the  reign  of 
Rosas — the  gaucho  Nero.  Bunge's  Novela  de 
la  Sangre  is  an  excellently  given  but  equally 
lurid  account  of  the  same  period.  La  Gloria 
de  Don  Ramiro,  by  Rodriguez  Larreta,  is  a  well- 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  131 

written  tale  of  the  days  of  Philip  the  Second. 
The  author,  the  present  Argentine  minister 
in  Paris,  spent  some  two  years  in  Spain  study- 
ing the  local  setting  of  his  romance.  Most 
Argentines,  if  they  have  not  read  these  novels, 
at  least  know  the  general  plots  and  the  more 
important  characters.  The  literature  of  the 
mother  country  is  little  read  and  as  a  rule 
looked  down  upon  by  the  Argentines,  who  are 
more  apt  to  read  French  or  even  English. 
La  NacioUy  which  is  one  of  the  two  great  morn- 
ing papers,  and  owned  by  a  son  of  Bartholome 
Mitre,  publishes  a  cheap  uniform  edition, 
which  is  formed  of  some  Argentine  reprints 
and  originals,  but  chiefly  of  French  and  English 
translations.  The  latest  publication  is  adver- 
tised on  the  front  page  of  the  newspaper,  and 
one  often  runs  across  ''old  friends"  whose 
"new  faces"  cause  a  momentary  check  to  the 
memory;  such  as  La  Feria  de  Vanidades,  the 
identity  of  which  is  clear  when  one  reads  that 
the  author  is  Thackeray.  This  "Biblioteca 
de  la  Nacion  "  is  poorly  got  up  and  printed  on 
wretched  paper,  but  seems  fairly  widely  read, 
and  will  doubtless  stimulate  the  scarcely  exist- 
ent literary  side  of  the  Argentine,  and  in  due 
time  bear  fruit.     Translations  of  Nick  Carter 


132   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

and  the  "penny  dreadfuls"  are  rife,  but  a  na- 
tive writer,  Gutierrez,  who  wrote  in  the  seven- 
ties and  eighties,  created  a  national  hero, 
Juan  Moreira,  who  was  a  benevolent  Billy  the 
Kid.  Gutierrez  wrote  many  "dramas  poli- 
ciales,"  which  are  well  worth  reading  for  the 
light  they  throw  in  their  side  touches  on 
"gaucho"  life  of  those  days. 

Argentines  are  justifiably  proud  of  Bartho- 
lome  Mitre,  their  historian  soldier,  who  was 
twice  president;  and  of  Sarmiento,  essayist 
and  orator,  who  was  also  president,  and  who 
introduced  the  educational  reforms  whose  ap- 
plication he  had  studied  in  the  United  States. 
At  an  auction  in  New  York  we  secured  a  pres- 
entation copy  of  his  Vida  de  Lincoln^  written 
and  published  in  this  country  in  1866.  Mitre 
first  published  his  history  of  General  Belgrano, 
of  revolutionary  fame,  in  two  volumes  in  1859. 
It  has  run  through  many  editions;  the  much- 
enlarged  one  in  four  volumes  is  probably  more 
universally  seen  in  private  houses  than  any 
other  Argentine  book.  The  first  edition  is 
now  very  rare  and  worth  between  forty  and 
fifty  dollars;  but  in  a  cheap  Italian  stationery- 
store  we  found  a  copy  in  excellent  condition 
and  paid  for  it  only  four  dollars  and  fifty  cents. 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  133 

The  edition  of  1887  brings  anywhere  from 
twenty  to  thirty  dollars.  Many  copies  were 
offered  at  sales,  but  we  delayed  in  hopes  of  a 
better  bargain,  and  one  night  our  patience 
was  rewarded.  It  was  at  the  fag  end  of  a 
private  auction  of  endless  rooms  of  cheap  and 
tawdry  furniture  that  the  voluble  auctioneer 
at  length  reached  the  contents  of  the  solitary 
bookcase.  Our  coveted  copy  was  knocked 
down  to  us  at  eight  dollars 

In  native  houses  one  very  rarely  finds  what 
we  would  even  dignify  by  the  name  of  library. 
Generally  a  fair-sized  bookcase  of  ill-assorted 
volumes  is  regarded  as  such.  There  are,  how- 
ever, excellent  legal  and  medical  collections  to 
be  seen,  and  Doctor  Moreno's  colonial  quinta, 
with  its  well-filled  shelves,  chiefly  volumes  of 
South  American  exploration  and  development 
from  the  earliest  times,  forms  a  marked  excep- 
tion— an  oasis  in  the  desert.  We  once  went 
to  stay  in  the  country  with  some  Argentines, 
who  seeing  us  arrive  with  books  in  our  hands, 
proudly  offered  the  use  of  their  library,  to 
which  we  had  often  heard  their  friends  make 
reference.  For  some  time  we  were  greatly 
puzzled  as  to  the  location  of  this  much-talked- 
of  collection,   and  were  fairly   staggered   on 


134    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

having  a  medium-sized  bookcase,  half  of  which 
was  taken  up  by  a  set  of  excerpts  from  the 
"world's  great  thinkers  and  speakers,"  in 
French,  pointed  out  as  "the  Ubrary." 

As  a  rule  the  first  thing  a  family  will  part 
with  is  its  books.  There  are  two  sorts  of  auc- 
tions— ^judicial  and  booksellers'.  The  latter 
class  are  held  by  dealers  who  are  having  bad 
times  and  hope  to  liquidate  some  of  their  stock, 
but  there  are  always  cappers  in  the  crowd 
who  keep  bidding  until  a  book  is  as  high  and 
often  higher  than  its  market  price.  The  ma- 
jority of  the  books  are  generally  legal  or  medi- 
cal; and  there  is  always  a  good  number  of 
young  students  who  hope  to  get  reference  books 
cheaply.  Most  of  the  books  are  in  Spanish, 
but  there  is  a  sprinkling  of  French,  and  often 
a  number  of  English,  German,  and  Portuguese, 
though  these  last  are  no  more  common  in  Ar- 
gentina than  are  Spanish  books  in  Brazil. 
At  one  auction  there  were  a  number  of  Por- 
tuguese lots  which  went  for  far  more  than  they 
would  have  brought  in  Rio  or  Sao  Paulo. 
Translations  from  the  Portuguese  are  infre- 
quent; the  only  ones  we  can  recall  were  of 
Camoes  and  Ega  de  Queiroz.  In  Brazil  the 
only  translation  from  Spanish  we  met  with  was 
of  Don  Quixote, 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  135 

English  books  generally  go  reasonably  at 
auctions.  We  got  a  copy  of  Page's  Paraguay 
and  the  River  Plate  for  twenty-five  cents,  but 
on  another  occasion  had  some  very  sharp  bid- 
ding for  Wilcox's  History  of  Our  Colony  in  the 
River  Plate,  London,  1807,  written  during  the 
brief  period  when  Buenos  Ayres  was  an  English 
possession.  It  was  finally  knocked  down  to  us 
at  twelve  dollars;  and  after  the  auction  our 
opponent  oflFered  us  twice  what  he  had  let  us 
have  it  for;  we  don't  yet  know  what  it  is 
worth.  The  question  of  values  is  a  diflScult 
one,  for  there  is  little  or  no  data  to  go  upon; 
in  consequence,  the  element  of  chance  is  very 
considerable.  From  several  sources  in  the 
book  world,  we  heard  a  wild  and  most  im- 
probable tale  of  how  Quaritch  and  several 
other  London  houses  had  many  years  ago  sent 
a  consignment  of  books  to  be  auctioned  in  the 
Argentine;  and  that  the  night  of  the  auction 
was  so  cold  and  disagreeable  that  the  exceed- 
ingly problematical  buyers  were  still  further 
reduced.  The  auction  was  held  in  spite  of 
conditions,  and  rare  incunabula  are  reported 
to  have  gone  at  a  dollar  apiece. 

There  was  one  judicial  auction  that  lasted 
for  the  best  part  of  a  week — l^e  entire  stock 


136   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

of  a  large  bookstore  that  had  failed.  They 
were  mostly  new  books,  and  such  old  ones  as 
were  of  any  interest  were  interspersed  in  lots 
of  ten  or  more  of  no  value.  The  attendance 
was  large  and  bidding  was  high.  To  get  the 
few  books  we  wanted  we  had  also  to  buy  a 
lot  of  waste  material;  but  when  we  took  this 
to  a  small  and  heretofore  barren  bookstore  to 
exchange,  we  found  a  first  edition  of  the  three 
first  volumes  of  Kosmos,  for  which,  with  a  num- 
ber of  Portuguese  and  Spanish  books  thrown 
in,  we  made  the  exchange.  We  searched  long 
and  without  success  for  the  fourth  volume, 
but  as  the  volumes  were  published  at  long 
intervals,  it  is  probable  that  the  former  owner 
had  only  possessed  the  three. 

Our  best  finds  were  made  not  at  auctions 
but  in  bookstores — often  in  little  combination 
book,  cigar,  and  stationery  shops.  We  hap- 
pened upon  one  of  these  latter  one  Satur- 
day noon  on  our  way  to  lunch  at  a  little 
Italian  restaurant,  where  you  watched  your 
chicken  being  most  deliciously  roasted  on  a 
spit  before  you.  Chickens  were  forgotten, 
and  during  two  hours'  breathless  hunting  we 
found  many  good  things,  among  them  a  bat- 
tered old  copy  of  Byron's  poems,  which  had 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  137 

long  since  lost  its  binding.  Pasted  in  it  was 
the  following  original  letter  of  Byron's,  which 
as  far  as  we  know  has  never  before  been  pub- 
lished:* 

A  Monsieur, 

Monsieur  Galignani, 
18  Rue  Vivienne, 
Paris. 

Sm:  In  various  numbers  of  your  journal  I  have 
seen  mentioned  a  work  entitled  The  Vampire^  with  the 
addition  of  my  name  as  that  of  the  author.  I  am  not 
the  author,  and  never  heard  of  the  work  in  question  until 
now.  In  a  more  recent  paper  I  perceive  a  formal  an- 
nimciation  of  The  Vampire,  with  the  addition  of  an  ac- 
count of  my  "residence  in  the  Island  of  Mitylane,"  an 
island  which  I  have  occasionally  sailed  by  in  the  course 
of  travelling  some  years  ago  through  the  Levant — and 
where  I  should  have  no  objection  to  reside — ^but  where  I 
have  never  yet  resided.  Neither  of  these  performances 
are  mine — and  I  presume  that  it  is  neither  unjust  nor 
ungracious  to  request  that  you  will  favour  me  by  con- 
tradicting the  advertisement  to  which  I  allude.  If  the 
book  is  clever,  it  would  be  base  to  deprive  the  real 
writer — ^whoever  he  may  be — of  his  honours — and  if 
stupid  I  desire  the  responsibility  of  nobody's  dulness  but 
my  own.  You  will  excuse  the  trouble  I  give  you — the 
imputation  is  of  no  great  importance — and  as  long  as 
it  was  confined  to  surmises  and  reports — I  should  have 
received  it  as  I  have  received  many  others — in  silence. 

*  Since  writing  this  we  have  heard  from  a  friend  who  is  learned  in 
books.  He  tells  us  that  he  believes  the  letter  to  be  an  excellent  fac- 
simile pasted  in  the  edition  concerned. 


138   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

But  the  formality  of  a  public  advertisement  of  a  book 
I  never  wrote,  and  a  residence  where  I  never  resided — is 
a  little  too  much — ^particularly  as  I  have  no  notion  of 
the  contents  of  the  one — ^nor  the  incidents  of  the  other. 
I  have  besides  a  personal  dislike  to  "vampires,"  and  the 
little  acquaintance  I  have  with  them  would  by  no  means 
induce  me  to  divulge  their  secrets.  You  did  me  a  much 
less  injury  by  your  paragraphs  about  "my  devotion" 
and  "abandonment  of  society  for  the  sake  of  religion" — 
which  appeared  in  your  Messenger  during  last  Lent — 
all  of  which  are  not  founded  on  fact — ^but  you  see  I 
do  not  contradict  them,  because  they  are  merely  per- 
sonal, whereas  the  others  in  some  degree  concern  the 
reader.  .  .  . 

You  will  oblige  me  by  complying  with  my  request  for 
contradiction.  I  assure  you  that  I  know  nothing  of  the 
work  or  works  in  question — and  have  the  honour  to  be 
(as  the  correspondents  to  magazines  say)  "your  constant 
reader"  and  very  ,     , 

humble  Servt,      ^^^^ 

To  the  editor  of  Gal{gnani*s  Messenger,    Etc.,  etc.,  etc. 
Venice,  April  27,  1819. 

Curiously  enough,  the  book  itself  had  been 
published  by  Galignani  in  1828.  The  cost  of 
our  total  purchases,  a  goodly  heap,  amounted 
to  but  five  dollars. 

The  balance  in  quantity  if  not  in  quality 
in  old  books  is  held  in  Buenos  Ayres  by  three 
brothers  named  Palumbo — Italians.  The  eld- 
est is  a  surly  old  man  who  must  be  treated  with 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  139 

severity  from  the  very  beginning.  How  he 
manages  to  support  himself  we  do  not  know, 
for  whenever  we  were  in  his  store  we  were  sure 
to  hear  him  assail  some  customer  most  abu- 
sively. In  a  small  subsidiary  store  of  his, 
among  a  heap  of  old  pamphlets,  we  came  upon 
the  original  folios  of  Humboldt's  account  of 
the  fauna  and  flora  of  South  America.  Upon 
asking  the  price,  the  man  said  thirty-five  apiece 
— we  thought  he  meant  pesos,  and  our  sur- 
prise was  genuine  when  we  found  he  meant 
centavos — about  fifteen  cents.  From  him  we 
got  the  first  edition  of  Kendall's  Santa  Fe  Ex- 
pedition, One  of  his  brothers  wasVery  pleasant 
and  probably,  in  consequence,  the  most  pros- 
perous of  the  three.  The  third  was  reputed 
crazy,  and  certainly  acted  so,  but  after  an 
initial  encounter  we  became  friends  and  got  on 
famously.  All  three  had  a  very  fair  idea  of 
the  value  of  Argentine  books,  but  knew  little 
or  nothing  about  English. 

Another  dealer  who  has  probably  a  better 
stock  than  any  of  the  Palumbos  is  a  man 
named  Real  y  Taylor.  His  grandmother  was 
English,  and  his  father  spent  his  life  dealing  in 
books.  At  his  death  the  store  was  closed  and 
the  son  started  speculating  in  land  with  the 


140   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

money  his  father  had  left  him.  Prices  soared 
and  he  bought,  but  when  the  crash  came  he 
was  caught  with  many  others.  Bethinking 
himself  of  his  father's  books,  he  took  them  out 
of  storage  and  opened  a  small  booth.  The 
stock  was  large  and  a  good  part  of  it  has  not 
yet  been  unpacked.  Taylor  has  only  a  superfi- 
cial knowledge  of  what  he  deals  in.  He  shears 
folios,  strips  off  original  boards  and  old  leathers 
to  bind  in  new  pasteboard,  and  raises  the  price 
five  or  ten  dollars  after  the  process.  In  this 
he  is  no  different  from  the  rest,  for  after  a  fairly 
comprehensive  experience  in  Buenos  Ayres 
we  may  give  it  as  our  opinion  that  there  is  not 
a  single  dealer  who  knows  the  "rules"  as  they 
are  observed  by  scores  of  dealers  in  America 
and  England.  Taylor  had  only  one  idea,  and 
that  was  that  if  any  one  were  interested  in  a 
book,  that  book  must  be  of  great  value;  he 
would  name  a  ridiculous  price,  and  it  was  a 
question  of  weeks  and  months  before  he  would 
reduce  it  to  anything  within  the  bounds  of 
reason.  We  never  really  got  very  much  from 
him,  the  best  things  being  several  old  French 
books  of  early  voyages  to  South  America  and 
a  first  edition  of  Anson's  Voyage  Around  the 
World,    Just  before  we  left  he  decided  to  auc- 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  141 

tion  ofi  his  stock,  putting  up  five  hundred 
lots  a  month.  The  first  auction  lasted  three 
nights.  The  catalogue  was  amusing,  giving  a 
description  of  each  book  in  bombastic  fashion 
— all  were  "unique  in  interest,"  and  about 
every  third  was  the  "only  copy  extant  outside 
the  museums."  He  had  put  base  prices  on 
most,  and  for  the  rest  had  arranged  with 
cappers.  The  attendance  was  very  small  and 
nearly  everything  was  bid  in.  It  was  curious 
to  see  how  to  the  last  he  held  that  any  book 
that  any  one  was  interested  in  must  be  of 
unusual  worth.  There  was  put  up  a  French 
translation  of  Azara's  Quadrupeds  of  Paraguay. 
The  introduction  was  by  Cuvier,  but  it  was 
not  of  great  interest  to  us,  for  a  friend  had 
given  us  the  valuable  original  Spanish  edition. 
Taylor  had  asked  fifteen  dollars,  which  we  had 
regarded  as  out  of  the  question;  he  then  took 
off  the  original  binding,  cut  and  colored  the 
pages,  and  rebound  it,  asking  twenty  dollars. 
At  the  auction  we  thought  we  would  get  it, 
if  it  went  for  very  little;  but  when  we  bid, 
Taylor  got  up  and  told  the  auctioneer  to  say 
that  as  it  was  a  work  of  unique  value  he  had 
put  as  base  price  fifteen  dollars  each  for  the 
two  volumes.    The  auction  was  a  failure,  and 


142   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

as  it  had  been  widely  and  expensively  adver- 
tised, the  loss  must  have  been  considerable. 

As  a  whole,  we  found  the  booksellers  of 
a  disagreeable  temperament.  In  one  case  we 
almost  came  to  blows;  luckily  not  until  we 
had  looked  over  the  store  thoroughly  and 
bought  all  we  really  wanted,  among  them  a 
first  edition  of  Howells's  Italian  Journeys^  in 
perfect  condition,  for  twenty-five  cents.  There 
were,  of  course,  agreeable  exceptions,  such  as 
the  old  French-Italian  from  whom,  after  many 
months'  intermittent  bargaining,  we  bought  Le 
Vaillant's  Voyage  en  Afrique,  the  first  edition, 
with  most  delightful  steel-engravings.  He  at 
first  told  us  he  was  selling  it  at  a  set  price 
on  commission,  which  is  what  we  found  they 
often  said  when  they  thought  you  wanted  a 
book  and  wished  to  preclude  bargaining.  This 
old  man  had  Amsterdam  catalogues  that  he 
consulted  in  regard  to  prices  when,  as  could 
not  have  been  often  the  case,  he  found  in  them 
references  to  books  he  had  in  stock.  We  know 
of  no  Argentine  old  bookstore  that  prints  a 
catalogue. 

In  the  larger  provincial  cities  of  Argentina 
we  met  with  singularly  little  success.  In 
Cordoba  the  only  reward  of  an  eager  search 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  143 

was  a  battered  paper-covered  copy  of  All  on 
the  Irish  Shore,  with  which  we  were  glad  to 
renew  an  acquaintance  that  had  lapsed  for 
several  years.  We  had  had  such  high  hopes  of 
Cordoba,  as  being  the  old  university  town  and 
early  centre  of  learning!  There  was  indeed 
one  trail  that  seemed  to  promise  well,  and  we 
diligently  pursued  vague  stories  of  a  "viejo" 
who  had  trunks  of  old  books  in  every  language, 
but  when  we  eventually  found  his  rooms, 
opening  off  a  dirty  little  patio,  they  were  empty 
and  bereft;  and  we  learned  from  a  grimy  brood 
of  children  that  he  had  gone  to  the  hospital 
in  Buenos  Ayres  and  died  there,  and  that  his 
boxes  had  been  taken  away  by  they  knew  not 
whom. 

As  in  Argentina,  the  best-known  Chilian 
writers  are  historians  or  lawyers;  and  in  our 
book-hunts  in  Santiago  we  encountered  more 
or  less  the  same  conditions  that  held  in  Buenos 
Ayres — shelf  upon  shelf  of  legal  or  medical 
reference  books  and  technical  treatises.  The 
works  of  certain  well-known  historians,  such  as 
Vicuna  Mackenna  and  Amonategui,  consis- 
tently command  relatively  high  prices;  but, 
as  a  whole,  books  are  far  cheaper  on  the  west 
side  of  the  Andes.    One  long  afternoon  in 


144    THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

the  Calle  San  Diego  stands  out.  It  was  a 
rich  find,  but  we  feel  that  the  possibihties  of 
that  store  are  still  unexhausted.  That  after- 
noon's trove  included  the  first  edition  of 
Mungo  Park's  Travels,  with  the  delightful 
original  etchings;  a  History  of  Guatemala, 
written  by  the  Dominican  missionaries,  pub- 
lished in  1619,  an  old  leather-bound  folio,  in 
excellent  shape;  a  first  edition  of  Holmes's 
Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast-Table  and  three  of 
the  eight  volumes  of  State  Papers  and  Publick 
Documents  of  the  United  States.  In  these  last 
there  was  James  Monroe's  book-plate,  and  it 
was  curious  to  imagine  how  these  volumes 
from  his  library  had  found  their  way  to  a  coun- 
try where  his  "doctrine"  has  been  the  subject 
of  such  bitter  discussion  and  so  much  misin- 
terpretation. The  value  of  the  original  covers 
was  no  more  understood  in  Chile  than  in  Ar- 
gentina, and  we  got  a  complete  set  of  Vicuna 
Mackenna's  Campana  de  Tacna  in  the  original 
pamphlets,  as  published,  for  but  half  what 
was  currently  asked  for  bound  and  mutilated 
copies. 

Valparaiso  proved  a  barren  field,  and  al- 
though one  of  the  chief  delights  in  book-hunt- 
ing lies  in  the  fact  that  you  can  never  feel  that 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  145 

you  have  completely  exhausted  the  possibiKties 
of  a  place,  we  came  nearer  to  feeling  that  way 
about  Valparaiso  than  we  ever  had  about  a 
town  before.  We  found  but  one  store  that 
gave  any  promise,  and  from  it  all  we  got  were 
the  first  seven  volumes  of  Dickens's  Household 
Words  in  perfect  condition,  and  the  Campaign 
of  the  Rapidan, 

The  little  coast  towns  of  Chile  and  Peru 
are  almost  as  barren  as  the  desert  rocks  and 
sand-hills  that  surround  them;  but  even  here 
we  had  occasional  surprises,  as  when  we 
picked  up  for  fifty  cents,  at  Antofogasta,  a 
desolate,  thriving  little  mining-port  in  the 
north  of  Chile,  Vicuna  Mackenna's  Life  of 
O'Higgins,  for  which  the  current  price  is  from 
ten  to  fifteen  dollars.  Another  time,  in  Co- 
quimbo,  we  saw  a  man  passing  along  the  street 
with  a  hammered-copper  bowl  that  we  coveted, 
and  following,  we  found  him  the  owner  of  a 
junk-shop  filled  with  a  heterogeneous  collection 
of  old  clothes,  broken  and  battered  furniture, 
horse-trappings,  and  a  hundred  and  one  odds 
and  ends,  among  which  were  scattered  some 
fifty  or  sixty  books.  One  of  these  was  a  first 
edition  of  Hawthorne's  Twice-Told  Tales  in 
the  familiar  old  brown  boards  of  Ticknor  & 
Company. 


146   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

Our  South  American  book-hunting  ended  in 
Lima,  the  entrancing  old  city  of  the  kings, 
once  the  capital  of  the  New  World,  and  not 
yet  robbed  by  this  commercial  age  of  all  its 
glamour  and  backwardness.  We  expected 
much,  knowing  that  when  the  Chilians  occu- 
pied the  city  in  1880  they  sacked  the  national 
library  of  fifty  thousand  volumes  that  their 
own  liberator,  San  Martin,  had  founded  in 
1822,  and  although  many  of  the  books  were 
carried  off  to  Chile,  the  greater  part  was  scat- 
tered around  Lima  or  sold  by  weight  on  the 
streets.  We  shall  always  feel  that  with  more 
time,  much  patience,  and  good  luck  we  could 
have  unearthed  many  treasures;  although  at 
first  sight  the  field  is  not  a  promising  one,  and, 
as  elsewhere,  one's  acquaintances  assure  one 
that  there  is  nothing  to  be  found.  In  spite  of 
this,  however,  we  came  upon  a  store  that  ap- 
peared teeming  with  possibilities.  Without 
the  "flaire"  or  much  luck  it  might  be  passed 
by  many  times  without  exciting  interest. 
Over  the  dingy  grated  window  of  a  dilapidated 
colonial  house  is  the  legend  "Encuader- 
nacion  y  Imprenta"  ("Binding  and  Printing.") 
Through  the  grimy  window-panes  may  be  seen 
a  row  of  dull  law-books;  but  if  you  open  the 


TWO  BOOK-HUNTERS  147 

big  gate  and  cross  the  patio,  with  its  ancient 
hand-well  in  the  centre,  on  the  opposite  side 
are  four  or  five  rooms  with  shelves  of  books 
along  the  walls  and  tottering  and  fallen  piles 
of  books  scattered  over  the  floor.  Here  we 
picked  up  among  others  an  amusing  little  old 
vellum-covered  edition  of  Horace,  printed  in 
England  in  1606,  which  must  have  early  found 
its  way  to  South  America,  to  judge  from  the 
Spanish  scrawls  on  the  title-page.  We  also 
got  many  of  the  works  of  Ricardo  Palma, 
Peru's  most  famous  writer,  who  built  up  the 
ruined  national  library,  which  now  possesses 
some  sixty  thousand  volumes,  of  which  a 
tweKth  part  were  donated  by  our  own  Smith- 
sonian Institution.  One  of  the  volumes  we 
bought  had  been  given  by  Palma  to  a  friend, 
and  had  an  autograph  dedication  which  in 
other  countries  would  have  greatly  enhanced 
its  value,  but  which,  curiously  enough,  seems 
to  make  no  difference  in  South  America.  In 
Buenos  Ayres  we  got  a  copy  of  the  Letters  from 
Europe  of  Campos  Salles,  Brazil's  greatest 
president,  which  had  been  inscribed  by  him  to 
the  Argentine  translator.  Once  in  Sao  Paulo 
we  picked  up  an  autographed  copy  of  Gomes 
de  Amorim,  and  in  neither  case  did  the  auto- 


148   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

graph  enter  into  the  question  of  determining 
the  price. 

We  had  heard  rumors  of  possibiUties  in 
store  for  us  in  Ecuador,  Colombia,  and  Vene- 
zuela, but  Lima  was  our  "farthest  north," 
for  there  our  ramblings  in  South  America  were 
reluctantly  brought  to  a  close.  We  feel,  how- 
ever, that  such  as  they  were,  and  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  the  names  of  many  of  the  authors 
and  places  will  be  strange  to  our  brethren  who 
have  confined  their  explorations  to  the  northern 
hemisphere,  these  notes  may  awaken  interest 
in  a  little-known  field,  which,  if  small  in  com- 
parison with  America  or  the  Old  World,  offers 
at  times  unsuspected  prizes  and  rewards. 


VI 

I      Seth  Bullock- 
Sheriff  of  the  Black  Hills  Country 

r 


VI 


SETH  BULLOCK— SHERIFF  OP  THE 
BLACK  HILLS  COUNTRY 

With  the  death  of  Captain  Seth  Bullock,  of 
Deadwood,  South  Dakota,  there  came  to  us 
who  were  his  friends  not  only  a  deep  sense  of 
personal  loss,  but  also  the  realization  that  one 
of  the  very  last  of  the  old  school  of  frontiers- 
men had  gone,  one  of  those  whom  Lowell  char- 
acterized as  "stern  men  with  empires  in  their 
brains."  The  hard  hand  of  circumstance 
called  forth  and  developed  the  type,  and  for 
a  number  of  generations  the  battle  with  the 
wilderness  continued  in  bitter  force,  and  a  race 
was  brought  forth  trained  to  push  on  far  be- 
yond the  '*edge  of  cultivation,"  and  contend  in 
his  remote  fastnesses  with  the  Red  Indian,  and 
eke  out  a  hard-earned  existence  from  the  grim 
and  resentful  wilds.  In  the  wake  of  the  van- 
guard came  the  settler  and  after  him  the  mer- 
chant, and  busy  towns  sprang  up  where  the 
lonely  camp-fire  of  the  pioneer  had  flared  to 

151 


152   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

the  silent  forest.  The  restless  blood  of  the 
frontiers  pressed  ever  onward;  the  Indian 
melted  away  like  "snow  upon  the  desert's  dusty 
face";  the  great  herds  of  game  that  formerly 
blackened  the  plains  left  the  mute  testimony 
of  their  passing  in  the  scattered  piles  of 
whitened  skulls  and  bleached  bones.  At  last 
the  time  came  when  there  was  no  further  fron- 
tier to  conquer.  The  restless  race  of  empire- 
makers  had  staring  them  in  the  face  the  same 
fate  as  the  Indian.  Their  rough-and-ready 
justice  administered  out  of  hand  had  to  give 
way  before  the  judge  with  his  court-house  and 
his  jury.  The  majority  of  the  old  Indian 
fighters  were  shouldered  aside  and  left  to  end 
their  days  as  best  they  could,  forgotten  by 
those  for  whom  they  had  won  the  country. 
They  could  not  adapt  themselves  to  the  new 
existence;  their  day  had  passed  and  they  went 
to  join  the  Indian  and  the  buffalo. 

Captain  Seth  Bullock,  however,  belonged  to 
the  minority,  for  no  turn  of  the  wheel  could 
destroy  his  usefulness  to  the  community,  and 
his  large  philosophy  of  the  plains  enabled  him 
to  fit  into  and  hold  his  place  through  every 
shift  of  surroundings.  The  Captain's  family 
came  from  Virginia,  but  he  was  born  in  Wind- 


The  Captain  makes  advances  to  a  little  Indian  girl 


SETH  BULLOCK  153 

sor,  Ontario,  in  1849.  Before  he  was  twenty- 
he  had  found  his  way  to  Montana,  and  built 
for  himself  a  reputation  for  justice  which  at 
that  day  and  in  that  community  could  only  be 
established  by  cold  and  dauntless  courage. 

One  of  the  feats  of  his  early  days  of 
which  he  was  justly  proud  was  when  he  had 
himself  hung  the  first  man  to  be  hung  by  law 
in  Montana.  The  crowd  of  prospectors  and 
cow-punchers  did  not  approve  of  such  an  un- 
usual, unorthodox  method  of  procedure  as  the 
hanging  of  a  man  by  a  public  hangman  after 
he  had  been  duly  tried  and  sentenced.  They 
wished  to  take  the  prisoner  and  string  him  up 
to  the  nearest  tree  or  telegraph-pole,  with  the 
readiness  and  despatch  to  which  they  were 
accustomed.  To  evidence  their  disapproval 
they  started  to  shoot  at  the  hangman;  he  fled, 
but  before  the  crowd  could  secure  their  victim, 
the  Captain  had  the  mastery  of  the  situation, 
and,  quieting  his  turbulent  fellow  citizens  with 
a  cold  eye  and  relentless  six-shooter,  he  him- 
self performed  the  task  that  the  hangman  had 
left  unfinished.  The  incident  inspired  the 
mob  with  a  salutary  respect  for  the  law  and 
its  ability  to  carry  out  its  sentences.  I  do  not 
remember  whether  the  Captain  was  mayor  or 


154   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

sheriflF  at  the  time.  He  was  trusted  and  ad- 
mired as  well  as  feared,  and  when  he  was 
barely  twenty-two  he  was  elected  State  sen- 
ator from  Helena,  the  largest  town  in  the  then 
territory  of  Montana. 

It  was  in  1876  that  the  Captain  first  went 
to  the  Black  Hills,  that  lovely  group  of  moun- 
tains in  the  southwestern  corner  of  South 
Dakota.  He  came  with  the  first  rush  of 
prospectors  when  the  famous  Hidden  Treasure 
Mine  was  discovered.  On  the  site  of  what  is 
at  present  the  town  of  Deadwood  he  set  up  a 
store  for  miners'  supplies,  and  soon  had  estab- 
lished himself  as  the  arm  of  the  law  in  that 
very  lawless  community.  That  was  the  Cap- 
tain's r61e  all  through  his  life.  In  the  early 
years  he  would  spend  day  and  night  in  the 
saddle  in  pursuit  of  rustlers  and  road-agents. 
When  he  once  started  on  the  trail  nothing 
could  make  him  relinquish  it;  and  when  he 
reached  the  end,  his  quarry  would  better  sur- 
render without  drawing.  He  had  a  long  arm 
and  his  district  was  known  throughout  the 
West  as  an  unhealthy  place  for  bad  men. 
Starting  as  federal  peace  officer  of  the  Black 
Hills,  he  later  became  marshal  and  sheriff  of 
the  district,  and  eventually  marshal  of  South 


SETH  BULLOCK  155 

Dakota,  which  position  he  held  until  1914. 
As  years  passed  and  civiHzation  advanced, 
his  bag  of  malefactors  became  less  simple  in 
character,  although  maintaining  some  of  the 
old  elements.     In  1908  he  wrote  me: 

I  have  been  very  busy  lately;  pulled  two  horse  thieves 
from  Montana  last  week  for  stealing  horses  from  the 
Pine  Ridge  Indians.  I  leave  to-day  for  Leavenworth 
with  a  bank  cashier  for  mulling  a  bank.  He  may  turn 
up  on  Wall  Street  when  his  term  expires,  to  take  a  post 
graduate  course. 

In  1907  he  told  me  that  he  was  going  off 
among  the  Ute  Indians,  and  I  asked  him  to 
get  me  some  of  their  pipes.  He  answered: 
"The  Utes  are  not  pipe-makers;  they  spend 
all  their  time  rustling  and  eating  government 
grub.  We  had  six  horse-thieves  for  the  pen 
after  the  past  term  of  court,  and  should  get 
four  more  at  the  June  term  in  Pierre.  This 
will  keep  them  quiet  for  a  while.  I  am  now 
giving  my  attention  to  higher  finance,  and 
have  one  of  the  Napoleons — a  bank  president 
— in  jail  here.  He  only  got  away  with  $106,- 
000 — ^he  did  not  have  time  to  become  eligible 
for  the  Wall  Street  class." 

It  was  when  the  Captain  was  sheriff  of  the 
Black  Hills  that  father  first  met  him.    A  horse- 


156   THE  HAPPY   HUNTING-GROUNDS 

thief  that  was  "wanted"  in  the  Deadwood  dis- 
trict managed  to  shp  out  of  the  Captain's 
clutches  and  was  captured  by  father,  who  was 
deputy  sheriff  in  a  country  three  or  four  hun- 
dred miles  north.  A  Kttle  while  later  father 
had  to  go  to  Deadwood  on  business.  Fording 
a  river  some  miles  out  of  town  he  ran  into  the 
Captain.  Father  had  often  heard  of  Seth  Bul- 
lock, for  his  record  and  character  were  known 
far  and  wide,  and  he  had  no  difficulty  in  iden- 
tifying the  tall,  slim,  hawk-featured  Westerner 
sitting  his  horse  like  a  centaur.  Seth  Bullock, 
however,  did  not  know  so  much  about  father, 
and  was  very  suspicious  of  the  rough,  unkempt 
group  just  in  from  two  weeks'  sleeping  out  in 
the  gumbo  and  sage-brush.  He  made  up  his 
mind  that  it  was  a  tin-horn  gambling  outfit 
and  would  bear  close  watching.  He  was  not 
sure  but  what  it  would  be  best  to  turn  them 
right  back,  and  let  them  walk  around  his  dis- 
trict "like  it  was  a  swamp."  After  settling 
father's  identity  the  Captain's  suspicions  van- 
ished. That  was  the  beginning  of  their  life- 
long friendship. 

After  father  had  returned  to  the  East  to  live, 
Seth  Bullock  would  come  on  to  see  him  every 
so  often,  and  whenever  my  father's  campaign- 


SETH  BULLOCK  157 

ing  took  him  West  the  Captain  would  join  the 
train  and  stay  with  him  until  the  trip  was 
finished.  These  tours  were  rarely  without  in- 
cident, and  in  his  autobiography  father  has 
told  of  the  part  Seth  Bullock  played  on  one  of 
them. 

When,  in  1900,  I  was  nominated  for  Vice-President, 
I  was  sent  by  the  National  Committee  on  a  trip  into 
the  States  of  the  high  plains  and  the  Rocky  Mountains. 
These  had  all  gone  overwhelmingly  for  Mr.  Bryan  on 
the  free-silver  issue  four  years  previously,  and  it  was 
thought  that  I,  because  of  my  knowledge  of  and  ac- 
quaintanceship with  the  people,  might  accomplish  some- 
thing toward  bringing  them  back  into  line.  It  was  an 
interesting  trip,  and  the  monotony  usually  attendant 
upon  such  a  campaign  of  political  speaking  was  diversi- 
fied in  vivid  fashion  by  occasional  hostile  audiences. 
One  or  two  of  the  meetings  ended  in  riots.  One  meeting 
was  finally  broken  up  by  a  mob;  everybody  fought  so 
that  the  speaking  had  to  stop.  Soon  after  this  we  reached 
another  town  where  we  were  told  there  might  be  trouble. 
Here  the  local  committee  included  an  old  and  valued 
friend,  a  "two-gun"  man  of  repute,  who  was  not  in  the 
least  quarrelsome,  but  who  always  kept  his  word.  We 
marched  round  to  the  local  opera-house,  which  was 
packed  with  a  mass  of  men,  many  of  them  rather  rough- 
looking.  My  friend  the  two-gun  man  sat  immediately 
behind  me,  a  gun  on  each  hip,  his  arms  folded,  looking 
at  the  audience;  fixing  his  gaze  with  instant  intentness 
on  any  section  of  the  house  from  which  there  came  so 
much  as  a  whisper.  The  audience  listened  to  me  with 
rapt  attention.   At  the  end,  with  a  pride  in  my  rhetorical 


158   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

powers  which  proceeded  from  a  misunderstanding  of 
the  situation,  I  remarked  to  the  chairman :  "  I  held  that 
audience  well;  there  wasn't  an  interruption."  To  which 
the  chairman  replied:  "Interruption?  Well,  I  guess 
not !  Seth  had  sent  round  word  that  if  any  son  of  a 
gun  peeped  he'd  kill  him."    {Autobiography ,  p.  141.) 

Father  had  the  greatest  admiration  and 
aflfection  for  the  Captain.  It  was  to  him  that 
he  was  referring  in  his  autobiography  when 
he  wrote: 

I  have  sometimes  been  asked  if  Wister's  Virginian  is 
not  overdrawn;  why,  one  of  the  men  I  have  mentioned 
in  this  chapter  was  in  all  essentials  the  "Virginian"  in 
real  life,  not  only  in  his  force  but  in  his  charm. 

When  we  were  hunting  in  Africa  father 
decided  that  he  would  try  to  get  Seth  Bullock 
to  meet  us  in  Europe  at  the  end  of  the  trip. 
I  remember  father  describing  him  to  some  of 
our  English  friends  in  Khartoum,  and  saying: 
"Seth  Bullock  is  a  true  Westerner,  the  finest 
type  of  frontiersman.  He  could  handle  him- 
self in  any  situation,  and  if  I  felt  that  I  did 
not  wish  him  to  meet  any  particular  person, 
the  reflection  would  be  entirely  on  the  latter." 

The  Captain  wrote  me  that  he  was  afraid  he 
could  not  meet  us  in  London  because  of  the 
illness  of  one  of  his  daughters,  but  matters 


SETH  BULLOCK  159 

eventually  worked  out  in  such  a  way  that  he 
was  able  to  go  over  to  England,  and  when  he 
met  father  there  he  said  he  felt  like  hanging 
his  Stetson  on  the  dome  of  Saint  Paul's  and 
shooting  it  oflF,  to  show  his  exhilaration  at  the 
reunion.  He  thoroughly  enjoyed  himself  in 
England,  and  while  at  bottom  he  was  genu- 
inely appreciative  of  the  Britisher,  he  could 
not  help  poking  sly  fun  at  him.  I  remember 
riding  on  a  bus  with  him  and  hearing  him 
ask  the  conductor  where  this  famous  Picalilly 
Street  was.  The  conductor  said:  "You  must 
mean  Piccadilly,  sir."  The  Captain  entered 
into  a  lengthy  conversation  with  him,  and  with 
an  unmoved  stolidity  of  facial  expression  that 
no  Red  Indian  could  have  bettered,  referred 
each  time  to  "Picalilly,"  and  each  time  the 
little  bus  conductor  would  interpose  a  "You 
mean  Piccadilly,  sir,"  with  the  dogged  per- 
sistency of  his  race. 

The  major-domos  and  lackeys  at  the  Guild- 
hall and  other  receptions  and  the  "beefeaters" 
at  the  Tower  were  a  never-failing  source  of 
delight;  he  would  try  to  picture  them  on  a 
bad  pony  in  the  cow  country,  and  explain  that 
their  costume  would  "make  them  the  envy 
of  every  Sioux  brave  at  an  Indian  dog-dance." 


160   THE   HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

When  my  sister  and  I  were  in  Edinburgh, 
the  local  guide  who  took  us  through  the  Castle 
showed  us  an  ancient  gun,  which  instead  of 
being  merely  double-barrelled,  possessed  a 
cluster  of  five  or  six  barrels.  With  great 
amusement  he  told  us  how  an  American  to 
whom  he  had  been  showing  the  piece  a  few 
days  previously  had  remarked  that  to  be  shot 
at  with  that  gun  must  be  like  taking  a  shower- 
bath.  A  few  questions  served  to  justify  the 
conclusion  we  had  immediately  formed  as  to 
identity  of  our  predecessor. 

The  summer  that  I  was  fourteen  father 
shipped  me  off  to  the  Black  Hills  for  a  camping 
trip  with  Seth  Bullock.  I  had  often  seen  him 
in  the  East,  so  the  tall,  spare  figure  and  the 
black  Stetson  were  familiar  to  me  when  the 
Captain  boarded  the  train  a  few  stations  before 
reaching  Deadwood.  Never  shall  I  forget  the 
romance  of  that  first  trip  in  the  West.  It  was 
all  new  to  me.  Unfortunately  I  had  to  leave 
for  the  East  for  the  start  of  school  before  the 
opening  of  the  deer  season;  but  we  caught  a 
lot  of  trout,  and  had  some  unsuccessful  bear- 
hunts — hunts  which  were  doomed  to  un success 
before  they  started,  but  which  supplied  the 
requisite  thrill  notwithstanding.    All  we  ever 


SETH  BULLOCK  161 

found  of  the  bear  was  their  tracks,  but  we  had 
a  fleeting  ghmpse  of  a  bobcat,  and  that  was 
felt  amply  to  repay  any  amount  of  tramping. 
Our  bag  consisted  of  one  jack-rabbit.  The 
Captain  told  us  that  we  were  qualified  to  join 
a  French  trapper  whom  he  had  known.  The 
Frenchman  was  caught  by  an  unusually  early 
winter  and  snowed  in  away  off  in  the  hills. 
In  the  spring,  a  good  deal  to  every  one's  sur- 
prise, he  turned  up,  looking  somewhat  thin, 
but  apparently  totally  unconcerned  over  his 
forced  hibernation.  When  asked  what  he  had 
lived  on,  he  replied:  "Some  day  I  keel  two 
jack-rabeet,  one  day  one,  one  day  none!" 

The  Captain  and  I  took  turns  at  writing  my 
diary.     I  find  his  entry  for  August  26: 

Broke  camp  at  Jack  Boyden's  on  Sand  Creek  at  6.30 
A.  M.,  and  rode  via  Redwater  Valley  and  Hay  Creek  to 
Belle  Fourche,  arriving  at  the  S.  B.  ranch  at  two  o'clock; 
had  lunch  of  cold  cabbage;  visited  the  town;  returned 
to  camp  at  five  p.  m.  ;  had  supper  at  the  wagon  and 
fought  mosquitoes  until  ten  o'clock. 

Broke  camp  and  rode  via  Owl  Creek  divide  and  In- 
dian Creek  through  several  very  large  towns  inhabited 
chiefly  by  prairie  dogs,  to  our  camp  on  Porcupine  Creek. 
Fought  mosquitoes  from  3  A.  m.  to  breakfast  time. 

I  had  long  been  an  admirer  of  Bret  Harte, 
and  many  of  the  people  I  met  might  have 


162   THE  HAPPY   HUNTING-GROUNDS 

stepped  from  the  pages  of  his  stories.  There 
was  the  old  miner  with  twenty-two  children, 
who  couldn't  remember  all  their  names.  His 
first  wife  had  presented  him  with  ten  of  them, 
but  when  he  married  again  he  had  told  his 
second  wife  that  it  was  his  initial  venture  in 
matrimony.  He  gave  a  vivid  description  of 
the  scene  when  some  of  the  progeny  of  his  first 
marriage  unexpectedly  put  in  an  appearance. 
Time  had  smoothed  things  over,  and  the  knowl- 
edge of  her  predecessor  had  evidently  only  act- 
ed as  a  spur  to  greater  deeds,  as  exemplified 
in  the  twelve  additions  to  the  family. 

Then  there  was  the  old  lady  with  the  vine- 
gar jug.  She  was  the  postmistress  of  Buck- 
horn.  We  had  some  difficulty  in  finding  the 
post-office,  but  at  length  we  learned  that  the 
postmistress  had  moved  it  fifteen  miles  away, 
to  cross  the  State  border,  in  order  that  she 
might  live  in  Wyoming  and  have  a  vote.  We 
reached  the  shack  to  find  it  deserted,  but  we 
had  not  long  to  wait  before  she  rode  in,  pur- 
ple in  the  face  and  nearly  rolling  off  her  pony 
from  laughter.  She  told  us  that  she  had  got 
some  vinegar  from  a  friend,  and  while  she  was 
riding  along  the  motion  exploded  the  jug,  and 
the  cork  hit  her  in  the  head;  what  with  the 


SETH  BULLOCK  163 

noise  and  the  blow  she  made  sure  the  Ltidians 
were  after  her,  and  rode  for  her  life  a  couple 
of  miles  before  she  realized  what  had  happened. 

What  could  have  surpassed  the  names  of  the 
trails  along  which  we  rode  and  the  canyons  in 
which  we  camped?  There  was  Hidden  Trea- 
sure Gulch  and  Calamity  Hollow,  and  a  score 
more  equally  satisfying.  That  first  trip  was 
an  immense  success,  and  all  during  the  winter 
that  followed  whenever  school  life  became  par- 
ticularly irksome  I  would  turn  to  plans  for  the 
expedition  that  we  had  scheduled  for  the  next 
summer. 

When  the  time  to  leave  for  the  West  arrived 
I  felt  like  an  old  stager,  and  indulged  for  the 
first  time  in  the  delight  of  getting  out  my 
hunting  outfit,  deciding  what  I  needed,  and 
supplementing  my  last  summer's  rig  with  other 
things  that  I  had  found  would  be  useful.  Like 
all  beginners  I  imagined  that  I  required  a  lot 
for  which  I  had  in  reality  no  possible  use. 
Some  men  always  set  oflF  festooned  like  Christ- 
mas-trees, and  lose  half  the  pleasure  of  the 
trip  through  trying  to  keep  track  of  their  be- 
longings. They  have  special  candles,  patented 
lanterns,  enormous  jack-knives  with  a  blade 
to  fulfil  every  conceivable  purpose,  rifles  and 


164    THE   HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

revolvers  and  shotguns  galore;  almost  anything 
that  comes  under  the  classification  of  "'it  might 
come  in  handy."  The  more  affluent  hunter 
varies  only  in  the  quality  and  not  the  quan- 
tity of  his  "gadjets."  He  usually  has  each 
one  neatly  tucked  away  in  a  pigskin  case. 
The  wise  man,  however,  soon  learns  that  al- 
though anything  may  ''come  in  handy"  once 
on  a  trip,  you  could  even  on  that  occasion 
either  get  along  without  it  or  find  a  substitute 
that  would  do  almost  as  well.  It  is  surprising 
with  what  a  very  little  one  can  make  out  per- 
fectly comfortably.  This  was  a  lesson  which  I 
very  quickly  learned  from  the  Captain. 

The  second  trip  that  we  took  was  from 
Deadwood,  South  Dakota,  to  Medora,  North 
Dakota.  I  had  never  seen  the  country  in 
which  father  ranched,  and  Seth  Bullock  de- 
cided to  take  me  up  along  the  trail  that  father 
had  been  travelling  when  they  met  for  the 
first  time. 

We  set  off  on  Friday  the  13th,  and  naturally 
everything  that  happened  was  charged  up  to 
that  inauspicious  day.  We  lost  all  our  horses 
the  first  night,  and  only  succeeded  in  retriev- 
ing a  part  of  them.  Thereafter  it  started  in 
raining,  and  the  gumbo  mud  became  all  but 


SETH  BULLOCK  165 

impassable  for  the  "chuck-wagon."  The  mos- 
quitoes added  to  our  misery,  and  I  find  in  my 
diary  in  the  Captain's  handwriting  a  note  to 
the  effect  that  "Paul  shot  three  mosquitoes 
with  a  six-shooter.  Stanley  missed  with  a 
shotgun." 

The  Captain  was  as  stolid  and  unconcerned 
as  a  Red  Indian  through  every  change  of 
weather.  He  had  nicknamed  me  "Kim"  from 
Kipling's  tale,  and  after  me  he  had  named  a 
large  black  horse  which  he  always  rode.  It 
was  an  excellent  animal  with  a  very  rapid 
walk  which  proved  the  bane  of  my  existence. 
My  pony,  "Pickpocket,"  had  no  pace  that 
corresponded,  and  to  adapt  himself  was  forced 
to  travel  at  a  most  infernal  jiggle  that  was  not 
only  exceedingly  wearing  but  shook  me  round 
so  that  the  rain  permeated  in  all  sorts  of  crevices 
which  might  reasonably  have  been  expected  to 
prove  water-tight.  With  the  pride  of  a  boy 
on  his  second  trip,  I  could  not  bring  myself 
to  own  up  to  my  discomfort.  If  I  had,  the 
Captain  would  have  instantly  changed  his 
pace;  but  it  seemed  a  soft  and  un-Western 
admission  to  make,  so  I  suffered  in  external 
silence,  while  inwardly  heaping  every  insult  I 
could  think  of  upon  the  Captain's  mount.     We 


166   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

were  travelling  long  distances,  so  the  gait  was 
rarely  changed  unless  I  made  some  excuse  to 
loiter  behind,  and  then  walked  my  pony  in  slow 
and  solitary  comfort  until  the  Captain  was 
almost  out  of  sight,  and  it  was  time  to  press 
into  a  lope  which  comfortably  and  far  too 
rapidly  once  more  put  me  even  with  him. 

The  Captain  was  a  silent  companion;  he 
would  ride  along  hour  after  hour,  chewing  a 
long  black  cigar,  in  a  silence  broken  only  by 
verses  he  would  hum  to  himself.  There  was 
one  that  went  on  interminably,  beginning: 

"I  wonder  if  ever  a  cowboy 
Will  be  seen  in  those  days  long  to  come; 
I  wonder  if  ever  an  Indian 
Will  be  seen  in  that  far  bye-and-bye." 

Every  now  and  then  some  butte  would  sug- 
gest a  reminiscence  of  the  early  days,  and  a 
few  skilfully  directed  questions  would  lure  him 
into  a  chain  of  anecdotes  of  the  already  van- 
ished border-life.  He  was  continually  coming 
out  with  a  quotation  from  some  author  with 
whose  writings  I  had  never  thought  him  ac- 
quainted. Fishing  in  a  Black  HiUs  stream,  I 
heard  him  mutter: 

"So  you  heard  the  left  fork  of  the  Yuba 
As  you  stood  on  the  banks  of  the  To." 


'  SETH  BULLOCK  167 

He  had  read  much  of  Kipling's  prose  and 
poetry,  but  what  he  most  often  quoted  were 
the  lines  to  Fighting  Bob  Evans. 

In  his  house  in  Deadwood  he  had  a  good 
library,  the  sort  of  one  which  made  you  feel 
that  the  books  had  been  selected  to  read  and 
enjoy,  and  not  bought  by  the  yard  like  window- 
curtains,  or  any  other  furnishings  thought 
necessary  for  a  house.  Mrs.  Bullock  was  pres- 
ident of  the  "'Women's  Literary  Club,"  and  I 
remember  father  being  much  impressed  with 
the  work  that  she  was  doing. 

As  I  have  said  before,  the  Captain  was  a  man 
whom  changing  conditions  could  not  throw 
to  one  side.  He  would  anticipate  the  changes, 
and  himself  take  the  lead  in  them,  adapting 
himself  to  the  new  conditions;  you  could  count 
upon  finding  him  on  top.  He  was  very  proud 
of  the  fact  that  he  had  brought  the  first  alfalfa 
to  the  State,  and  showed  me  his  land  near 
Belle  Fourche,  where  he  had  planted  the  origi- 
nal crop.  Its  success  was  immediate.  He 
said  that  he  could  not  claim  the  credit  of  hav- 
ing introduced  potatoes,  but  an  old  friend  of 
his  was  entitled  to  the  honor,  and  he  delighted 
in  telling  the  circumstances.  The  Captain's 
friend,  whom  we  can  call  Judge  Jones,  for  I've 


168    THE   HAPPY   HUNTING-GROUNDS 

forgotten  his  name,  had  opened  a  trading-post 
in  what  was  at  that  time  the  wild  territory  of 
Dakota.  The  Indians  were  distinctly  hostile, 
and  at  any  good  opportunity  were  ready  to 
raid  the  posts,  murdering  the  factors  and  loot- 
ing the  trading  goods.  In  the  judge's  terri- 
tory there  was  one  particularly  ugly  customer, 
half  Indian  and  half  negro,  known  as  Nigger 
Bill.  The  judge  was  much  interested  in  the 
success  of  his  adventure  in  potatoes,  and  the 
following  was  one  of  the  letters  he  received 
from  his  factor,  as  Seth  Bullock  used  to  quote 
it  to  me: 

Dear  Judge, 

This  is  to  tell  you  all  is  well  here  and  I  hope  is  same 
with  you.  Nigger  Bill  came  to  the  door  of  the  stockade 
to-day  and  said  "I  am  going  to  get  in."  I  said  "Nigger 
Bill  you  will  not  get  in."  Nigger  Bill  said  "I  will  get 
in."  I  shot  Nigger  Bill.  He  is  dead.  The  potatoes  is 
doing  fine. 

Although  reahzing  to  the  full  that  the  change 
was  inevitable  and,  of  course,  to  the  best  in- 
terests of  the  country,  and.  naturally  taking 
much  pride  in  the  progress  his  State  was  mak- 
ing, the  Captain  could  not  help  at  times  feeling 
a  little  melancholy  over  the  departed  days 
when  there  was  no  wire  in  the  country,  and 


SETH  BULLOCK  169 

one  could  ride  where  one  listed.  He  wrote  me 
in  1911:  "The  part  of  South  Dakota  which 
you  knew  has  all  been  covered  with  the  shacks 
of  homesteaders,  from  Belle  Fourche  to  Me- 
dora,  and  from  the  Cheyenne  agency  to  the 
Creek  Where  the  Old  Woman  Died."  The  old 
times  had  gone,  never  to  return,  and  although 
the  change  was  an  advance,  it  closed  an  ex- 
istence that  could  never  be  forgotten  or  re- 
lived by  those  who  had  taken  part  in  it. 

The  Captain  gave  me  very  sound  advice 
when  I  was  trying  to  make  up  my  mind  whether 
or  not  to  go  to  college.  I  was  at  the  time 
going  through  the  period  of  impatience  that 
comes  to  so  many  boys  when  they  feel  that 
they  are  losing  valuable  time,  during  which 
they  should  be  starting  in  to  make  their  way 
in  the  world.  I  had  talked  it  over  with  the 
Captain  during  one  of  the  summer  trips,  and 
soon  afterward  he  wrote  me: 

Ride  the  old  studies  with  spurs.  I  don't  like  the  idea 
of  your  going  out  to  engage  in  business  until  you  have 
gone  through  Harvard.  You  will  have  plenty  of  time 
after  you  have  accomplished  this  to  tackle  the  world. 
Take  my  advice,  my  boy,  and  don't  think  of  it.  A  man 
without  a  college  education  nowadays  is  badly  handi- 
capped. If  he  has  had  the  opportunity  to  go  through 
college  and  does  not  take  advantage  of  it,  he  goes  through 


170   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

life  with  a  regret  that  becomes  more  intensified  as  he 
gets  older.  Life  is  a  very  serious  proposition  if  we 
would  live  it  well. 

I  went  through  college  and  I  have  often 
realized  since  how  excellent  this  advice  was, 
and  marvelled  not  a  little  at  the  many-sided- 
ness of  a  frontiersman  who  could  see  that  par- 
ticular situation  so  clearly. 

The  year  before  I  went  with  my  father  to 
Africa,  R.  H.  Munro  Ferguson  and  myself 
joined  the  Captain  in  South  Dakota  for  a 
prairie-chicken  hunt.  We  were  to  shoot  in 
the  vicinity  of  the  Cheyenne  Indian  reserva- 
tion, and  the  Captain  took  us  through  the  reser- 
vation to  show  us  how  the  Indian  question  was 
being  handled.  The  court  was  excellently  run, 
but  what  impressed  us  most  was  the  judge's 
name,  for  he  was  called  Judge  No  Heart. 
Some  of  our  hunting  companions  rejoiced  in 
equally  unusual  names.  There  were  Spotted 
Rabbit,  No  Flesh,  Yellow  Owl,  and  High 
Hawk,  not  to  forget  Spotted  Horses,  whose 
prolific  wife  was  known  as  Mrs.  Drops-Two-at- 
a-Time.  We  had  with  us  another  man  named 
Dave  Snowball,  who  looked  and  talked  just 
like  a  Southern  darky.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
he  was  haK  negro  and  half  Indian.     In  the  old 


SETH  BULLOCK  171 

days  negro  slaves  not  infrequently  escaped  and 
joined  the  Indians.  I  went  to  see  Dave's 
father.  There  was  no  mistaking  him  for  what 
he  was,  but  when  I  spoke  to  him  he  would 
answer  me  in  Sioux  and  the  only  English  words 
I  could  extract  from  him  were  "No  speak 
English."  He  may  have  had  some  hazy  idea 
that  if  he  talked  English  some  one  would 
arrest  him  and  send  him  back  to  his  old  mas- 
ters, although  they  had  probably  been  dead  for 
thirty  or  forty  years.  Possibly  living  so  long 
among  the  Sioux,  he  had  genuinely  forgotten 
the  language  of  his  childhood. 

High  Hawk  and  Oliver  Black  Hawk  were 
old  "hostiles."  So  was  Red  Bear.  We  came 
upon  him  moving  house.  The  tepee  had  just 
been  dismantled,  and  the  support  poles  were 
being  secured  to  a  violently  objecting  pony. 
A  few  weeks  later  when  we  were  on  the  train 
going  East,  Frederic  Remington  joined  us. 
He  was  returning  from  Montana,  and  upon 
hearing  that  we  had  been  on  the  Cheyenne 
reservation  he  asked  if  we  had  run  into  old 
Red  Bear,  who  had  once  saved  his  life.  He 
told  us  that  many  years  before  he  had  been 
picked  up  by  a  party  of  hostiles,  and  they  had 
determined  to  give  him  short  shrift,  when  Red 


172   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

Bear,  with  whom  he  had  previously  struck 
a  friendship,  turned  up,  and  successfully  inter- 
ceded with  his  captors.  One  reminiscence  led 
to  another,  and  we  were  soon  almost  as  grate- 
ful to  Red  Bear  for  having  opened  such  a 
store  as  Remington  had  been  for  having  his 
life  spared.  Frederic  Remington  was  a  bom 
raconteur,  and  pointed  his  stories  with  a  bluff, 
homely  philosophy,  redolent  of  the  plains  and 
the  sage-brush. 

The  night  before  we  left  the  Indians  the 
Captain  called  a  council.  All  the  old  "hos- 
tiles"  and  many  of  the  younger  generation 
gathered.  The  peace-pipes  circulated.  We 
had  brought  with  us  from  New  York  a  quan- 
tity of  German  porcelain  pipes  to  trade  with 
the  Indians.  Among  them  was  one  monster 
with  a  bowl  that  must  have  held  from  an 
eighth  to  a  quarter  of  a  pound  of  tobacco. 
The  Indians  ordinarily  smoke  "kinnikinick," 
which  is  chopped-up  willow  bark.  It  is  mild 
and  gives  a  pleasant,  aromatic  smoke.  The 
tobacco  which  we  had  was  a  coarse,  strong 
shag.  We  filled  the  huge  pipe  with  it,  and, 
lighting  it,  passed  it  round  among  the  silent, 
solemn  figures  grouped  about  the  fire.  The 
change  was  as  instantaneous  as  it  was  unpre- 


SETH  BULLOCK  173 

meditated.  The  first  "brave"  drew  deeply 
and  inhaled  a  few  strong  puffs;  with  a  choking 
splutter  he  handed  the  pipe  to  his  nearest 
companion.  The  scene  was  repeated,  and  as 
each  Indian,  heedless  of  the  fate  of  his  com- 
rades, inhaled  the  smoke  of  the  strong  shag,  he 
would  break  out  coughing,  until  the  pipe  had 
completed  the  circuit  and  the  entire  group  was 
coughing  in  unison.  Order  was  restored  and 
willow  bark  substituted  for  tobacco,  with  sat- 
isfactory results.  Then  we  each  tried  our 
hand  at  speaking.  One  by  one  the  Indians 
took  up  the  thread,  grunting  out  their  words 
between  puffs.  The  firelight  rose  and  fell, 
lighting  up  the  shrouded  shapes.  When  my 
turn  came  I  spoke  through  an  interpreter. 
Coached  by  the  Captain  as  to  what  were  their 
most  lamentable  failings — those  that  most  fre- 
quently were  the  means  of  his  making  their 
acquaintance — I  gave  a  learned  discourse  upon 
the  evils  of  rustling  ponies,  and  the  pleasant 
life  that  lay  before  those  who  abstained  from 
doing  so.  Grunts  of  approval,  how  sincere  I 
know  not,  were  the  gratifying  reply  to  my 
efforts.  The  powwow  broke  up  with  a  sub- 
stantial feast  of  barbecued  sheep,  and  next 
morning  we  left  our  nomadic  hosts  to  continue 


174   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

their  losing  fight  to  maintain  their  hereditary 
form  of  existence,  hemmed  in  by  an  ever- 
encroaching  white  man's  civiHzation. 

Near  the  reservation  we  came  upon  two  old 
outlaw  buffaloes,  last  survivors  of  the  great 
herds  that  not  so  many  years  previously  had 
roamed  these  plains,  providing  food  and  cloth- 
ing for  the  Indians  until  wiped  out  by  the 
ruthless  white  man.  These  two  bulls,  living 
on  because  they  were  too  old  and  tough  for 
any  one  to  bother  about,  were  the  last  sur- 
vivors left  in  freedom.  A  few  days  later  we 
were  shown  by  Scottie  Phillips  over  his  herd. 
He  had  many  pure  breeds  but  more  hybrids, 
and  the  latter  looked  the  healthier.  Scottie 
had  done  a  valuable  work  in  preserving  these 
buffalo.  He  was  a  squaw-man,  and  his  pleas- 
ant Indian  wife  gave  us  excellent  buffalo-berry 
preserves  that  she  had  put  up. 

Scottie's  ranch  typified  the  end  of  both 
buffalo  and  Indian.  Before  a  generation  is 
past  the  buffalo  will  survive  only  in  the  traces 
of  it  left  by  crossing  with  cattle;  and  the 
same  fate  eventually  awaits  the  Indian.  No 
matter  how  wise  be  the  course  followed  in  gov- 
erning the  remnants  of  the  Indian  race,  it  can 


.     SETH  BULLOCK  175 

only  be  a  question  of  time  before  their  indi- 
viduality sinks  and  they  are  absorbed. 

The  spring  following  this  expedition  I  set 
oflf  with  father  for  Africa.  The  Captain  took 
a  great  deal  of  interest  in  the  plans  for  the 
trip.    A  week  before  we  sailed  he  wrote: 

I  send  you  to-day  by  American  Express  the  best 
gun  I  know  of  for  you  to  carry  when  in  Africa.  It  is  a 
single  action  Colts  38  on  a  heavy  frame.  It  is  a  business 
weapon,  always  reliable,  and  will  shoot  where  you  hold 
it.  When  loaded,  carry  it  on  the  safety,  or  first  cock 
of  the  hammer. 

Seth  Bullock  was  a  hero-worshipper  and 
father  was  his  great  hero.  It  would  have 
made  no  diflference  what  father  did  or  said,  the 
Captain  would  have  been  unshakably  con- 
vinced without  going  into  the  matter  at  all 
that  father  was  justified.  There  is  an  old 
a'^:::'e  that  runs:  *'Any  one  can  have  friends 
tnat  stand  by  him  when  he's  right;  what  you 
want  is  friends  that  stand  by  you  when  you're 
wrong."  Seth  Bullock,  had  occasion  ever  de- 
manded it,  would  have  been  one  of  the  latter. 

In  the  Cuban  War  he  was  unable  to  get  into 
the  Rough  Riders,  and  so  joined  a  cowboy 
regiment  which  was  never  fortunate  enough  to 


176   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

get  over  to  Cuba,  but  suffered  all  its  casualties 
— and  there  were  plenty  of  them — from  typhoid 
fever,  in  a  camp  somewhere  in  the  South.  He 
was  made  a  sort  of  honorary  member  of  the 
Rough  Riders,  and  when  there  were  informal 
reunions  held  in  Washington  he  was  counted 
upon  to  take  part  in  them.  He  was  a  favorite 
with  every  one,  from  the  White  House  ushers 
to  the  French  Ambassador.  As  an  honorary 
member  of  the  Tennis  Cabinet  he  was  present 
at  the  farewell  dinner  held  in  the  White  House 
three  days  before  father  left  the  presidency. 
A  bronze  cougar  by  Proctor  had  been  selected 
as  a  parting  gift,  and  it  was  concealed  under  a 
mass  of  flowers  in  the  centre  of  the  table.  The 
Captain  had  been  chosen  to  make  the  presen- 
tation speech,  and  when  he  got  up  and  started 
fumbling  with  flowers  to  disclose  the  cougar 
father  could  not  make  out  what  had  happened. 

The  Captain,  as  he  said  himself,  was  a  poor 
hand  at  saying  good-by.  He  was  in  New 
York  shortly  before  we  sailed  for  Africa,  but 
wrote:  "I  must  leave  here  to-day  for  Sioux 
Falls;  then  again  I  am  a  mollycoddle  when  it 
comes  to  bidding  good-by;  can  always  easier 
write  good-by  than  speak  it." 

His  gloomy  forebodings  about  the  Brazilian 


SETH  BULLOCK  177 

trip  were  well  justified.    He  was  writing  me  to 
South  America: 

I  was  glad  to  hear  you  will  be  with  your  father.  I 
have  been  uneasy  about  this  trip  of  his,  but  now  that 
I  know  you  are  along  I  will  be  better  satisfied.  I  don't 
think  much  of  that  country  you  are  to  explore  as  a 
health  resort,  and  there  are  no  folks  like  home  folks 
when  one  is  sick. 

The  Captain  made  up  his  mind  that  if  his 
regiment  had  failed  to  get  into  the  Cuban 
War  the  same  thing  would  not  happen  in  the 
case  of  another  war.  In  July,  1916,  when  the 
Mexican  situation  seemed  even  more  acute 
than  usual,  I  heard  from  the  Captain: 

If  we  have  war  with  Mexico  you  and  I  will  have  to 
go.  I  am  daily  in  receipt  of  application  from  the  best 
riders  in  the  country.  Tell  the  Colonel  I  have  carried 
out  his  plan  for  the  forming  of  a  regiment,  and  within 
fifteen  days  from  getting  word  from  him,  will  have  a 
regiment  for  his  division  that  will  meet  with  his  ap- 
proval. You  are  to  have  a  captaincy  to  start  with.  I 
don't  think  Wilson  will  fight  without  he  is  convinced  it 
will  aid  in  his  election.  He  is  like  Artemus  Ward — 
wilhng  to  sacrifice  his  wife's  relations  on  the  altar  of 
his  country. 

The  Mexican  situation  continued  to  drag 
along,  but  we  at  length  entered  the  European 


178   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

war,  and  for  a  while  it  looked  as  if  my  father 
would  be  allowed  to  raise  a  division  and  take 
it  over  to  the  other  side.  The  Captain  had 
already  the  nucleus  of  his  regiment,  and  the 
telegrams  passed  fast  and  furiously.  How- 
ever, for  reasons  best  known  to  the  authori- 
ties in  Washington,  it  all  turned  out  to  be  to 
no  purpose.  The  Captain  was  enraged.  He 
wrote  me  out  to  Mesopotamia,  where  I  was 
serving  in  the  British  forces: 


I  was  very  much  disgusted  with  Wilson  when  he 
turned  us  down.  I  had  a  splendid  organization  twelve 
hundred  strong,  comprising  four  hundred  miners  from 
the  Black  Hills  Mines,  four  hundred  railroad  boys  from 
the  lines  of  the  Chicago  and  Northwestern,  and  the 
C.  B.  and  Q.  in  South  Dakota,  Western  Nebraska,  and 
Wyoming,  and  four  hundred  boys  from  the  ranges  of 
Western  South  Dakota,  Montana,  and  Wyoming.  It 
was  the  pick  of  the  country.  Your  troop  was  especially 
good;  while  locally  known  as  the  Deadwood  troop,  most 
of  the  members  were  from  the  country  northwest  of 
Belle  Fourche;  twenty  of  your  troop  were  Sioux  who 
had  served  on  the  Indian  police.  Sixty-five  per  cent  of 
the  regiment  had  miHtary  training.  Damn  the  dirty 
politics  that  kept  us  from  going.  I  am  busy  now  locally 
with  the  Red  Cross  and  the  Exemption  Board  of  this 
county,  being  chairman  of  each.  We  will  show  the 
Democrats  that  we  are  thoroughbreds  and  will  do  our 
bit  even  if  we  are  compelled  to  remain  at  home  with 
the  Democrats. 


SETH  BULLOCK  179 

After  expatiating  at  some  length  and  with 
great  wealth  of  detail  as  to  just  what  he  thought 
of  the  attitude  of  the  administration,  the  Cap- 
tain continued  with  some  characteristic  advice: 

I  am  going  to  caution  you  now  on  being  careful  whan 
you  are  on  the  firing  line.  Don't  try  for  any  Victoria 
Cross,  or  lead  any  forlorn  hopes;  modern  war  does  not 
require  these  sacrifices,  nor  are  battles  won  that  way 
nowadays.  I  wouldn't  have  you  fail  in  any  particular 
of  a  brave  American  soldier,  and  I  know  you  won't,  but 
there  is  a  vast  difference  between  bravery  and  foolhardi- 
ness,  and  a  man  with  folks  at  home  is  extremely  selfish 
if  unnecessarily  foolhardy  in  the  face  of  danger. 

All  of  it  very  good,  sound  advice,  and  just 
such  as  the  Captain  might  have  been  expected 
to  give,  but  the  last  in  the  world  that  any  one 
would  have  looked  for  him  to  personally  fol- 
low. 

The  letter  ended  with  "I  think  the  war  will 
be  over  this  year.  I  did  want  to  ride  a  spotted 
cayuse  into  Berlin,  but  it  don't  look  now  as  if 
I  would." 

The  next  time  that  I  heard  from  the  Cap- 
tain was  some  time  after  I  had  joined  the 
American  Expeditionary  Forces  in  France.  In 
characteristic  fashion  he  addressed  the  letter 
merely  "Care  of  General  Pershing,  France," 


180   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

and  naturally  the  letter  took  three  or  four 
months  before  it  finally  reached  me.  The  Cap- 
tain had  been  very  ill,  but  treated  the  whole 
matter  as  a  joke. 

I  have  just  returned  from  California,  where  I  was  on 
the  sick  list  since  last  December,  six  months  in  a  hospi- 
tal and  sanitarium  while  the  doctors  were  busy  with 
knives,  and  nearly  took  me  over  the  divide.  I  am 
recovering  slowly,  and  hope  to  last  till  the  Crown  Prince 
and  his  murdering  progenitor  are  hung.  I  was  chair- 
man of  the  Exemption  Board  in  1917  and  stuck  to  it 
until  I  was  taken  ill  with  grippe,  which  ended  in  an 
intestinal  trouble  which  required  the  services  of  two 
surgeons  and  their  willing  knives  to  combat.  The  folks 
came  to  California  after  the  remains,  but  when  they 
arrived  they  found  the  remains  sitting  up  and  cussing 
the  Huns. 

Now,  Kim,  take  care  of  yourself;  don't  get  reckless. 
Kill  all  the  Huns  you  can,  but  don't  let  them  have  the 
satisfaction  of  getting  you. 

My  father's  death  was  a  fearful  blow  to  the 
old  Captain.  Only  those  who  knew  him  well 
realized  how  hard  he  was  hit.  He  immediately 
set  to  work  to  arrange  some  monument  to  my 
father's  memory.  With  the  native  good  taste 
that  ever  characterized  him,  instead  of  think- 
ing in  terms  of  statues,  he  decided  that  the 
dedication  of  a  mountain  would  be  most  fit- 
ting, and  determined  to  make  the  shaft  to  be 


SETH  BULLOCK  181 

placed  upon  its  summit  simple  in  both  form 
and  inscription.  Father  was  the  one  honorary 
member  of  the  Society  of  Black  Hills  Pioneers, 
and  it  was  in  conjunction  with  this  society 
that  the  Captain  arranged  that  Sheep  Moun- 
tain, a  few  miles  away  from  Deadwood,  should 
be  renamed  Mount  Roosevelt. 

General  Wood  made  the  address.  A  num- 
ber of  my  friends  who  were  there  gave  me  the 
latest  news  of  the  Captain.  He  wrote  me  that 
he  expected  to  come  East  in  September;  that 
he  was  not  feeling  very  fit,  and  that  he  was 
glad  to  have  been  able  to  go  through  with  the 
dedication  of  the  mountain.  He  was  never  a 
person  to  talk  about  himself,  so  I  have  no  way 
of  knowing,  other  than  intuition,  but  I  am 
certain  that  he  felt  all  along  that  his  days  were 
numbered,  and  held  on  mainly  in  order  to 
accomplish  his  purpose  of  raising  the  memorial. 

I  waited  until  the  middle  of  September  and 
then  wrote  to  Deadwood  to  ask  the  Captain 
when  he  would  be  coming.  I  found  the  reply 
in  the  newspapers  a  few  days  later.  The  Cap- 
tain was  dead.  The  gallant  old  fellow  had 
crossed  the  divide  that  he  wrote  about,  leaving 
behind  him  not  merely  the  sorrow  of  his  friends 
but  their  pride  in  his  memory.     Well  may  we 


182   THE  HAPPY  HUNTING-GROUNDS 

feel  proud  of  having  been  numbered  among 
the  friends  of  such  a  thoroughgoing,  upstand- 
ing American  as  Seth  Bullock.  As  long  as  our 
country  produces  men  of  such  caliber,  we  may 
face  the  future  with  a  consciousness  of  our 
ability  to  win  through  such  dark  days  as  may 
confront  us.  The  changes  and  shif tings  that 
have  ever  accompanied  our  growth  never  found 
Seth  Bullock  at  a  loss;  he  was  always  ready  to 

"Turn  a  keen,  untroubled  face 
Home  to  the  instant  need  of  things." 

Throughout  his  well-rounded  and  picturesque 
career  he  coped  with  the  varied  problems  that 
confronted  him  in  that  unostentatious  and 
unrufl3ed  way  so  peculiarly  his  own,  with 
which  he  faced  the  final  and  elemental  fact  of 
his  recall  from  service. 


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